Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature: Batting for the Opposition

Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature

The most well known negative critiques of modern sport are found in academic works within the social sciences. This book seeks to take a critical view of sport from the perspective of the humanities, drawing on literature, specifically on the writings of selected novelists and poets. The principal aim is to widen an existing anti-sport discourse to include hitherto excluded voices from the world of literature. The book commences with a review of existing pro- and anti-sport discourses and then proceeds to examine, in turn, the written works of six eminent authors, excavating from their writings their anti-sport rhetorics. These writers are Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), Charles Hamilton Sorley, Jerome K. Jerome, John Betjeman, Alan Sillitoe and Philip Roth. In its conclusion, the book draws together the broad themes discussed in the preceding chapters. This is an innovative approach to sport and literature, remarkable for it not having been previously explored in any depth, and will be of interest to readers from both social sciences and humanities backgrounds. John Bale is Emeritus Professor of Sports Studies at Keele University, UK, and an honorary professor at Queensland University, Australia, and De Montfort University, UK.

Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature Batting for the opposition

John Bale

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 John Bale All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners, but the author and publishers would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to their attention so that corrections can be published at a later printing. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bale, John. Anti-sport sentiments in literature : batting for the opposition / John Bale. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-42265-9 1. English literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. English literature-19th century--History and criticism. 3. Sports in literature. 4. Sports literature-History and criticism. I. Title. PR478.S66B35 2007 820.9'0091--dc22 2007020624 ISBN 0-203-93582-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN-10: 0–415–42265–5 (hbk) ISBN-10: 0–203–93582–9 (ebk) ISBN-13: 978–0–415–42265–9 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978–0–203–93582–8 (ebk)

For Ruth, Rod and Ant

Some fool said, ‘the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’; and a fool he was too. Games don’t win battles, but brains do, and brains aren’t trained on the footer field. It is time we realised that. (Alec Waugh, The Loom of Youth, 1919)

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature [...] is to write anything original. (Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, 1872)

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements List of permissions 1 Sport and literature

xi xiii xv 1

2 Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

17

3 Charles Hamilton Sorley

39

4 Jerome K. Jerome

56

5 John Betjeman

77

6 Alan Sillitoe

96

7 Philip Roth

112

8 Fictions, facts, binaries and places

149

Notes Select bibliography Index

155 190 197

Figures

2.1 Dodgsonian landscape of order and sport (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass) 2.2 Dodgsonian landscape of uncertainty and anti-sport (Lewis Carroll, from a letter to Ina Watson) 3.1 Charles Sorley, age 20 (Cambridge University Press) 4.1 Manipulation of individual human beings for the sake of propagation of a political idea: Prague Spartakiad 1986 (Photograph courtesy of Zdenûk Lhoták) 4.2 Football in 1895 (To-Day) 5.1 The Heretick (reproduced by kind permission of Marlborough College) 5.2 Games (John Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest) 6.1 The crucial moment (author’s photograph, MGM films) 7.1 Baseball pastoral? (National League of Professional Baseball Clubs)

30 31 43

70 72 79 84 109 141

Acknowledgements

Most of this study was researched and written at the Centre for Sports Studies, University of Aarhus, where for six years I was a visiting professor. I am grateful to my colleagues in Denmark for their support for my work. I must also thank Gary Osmond and Anthony Bateman, who were visiting scholars at the Centre in 2005, for comments on and discussions about some of the following essays and on various ideas relating to sport, writing and literature. I also acknowledge that a version of Chapter 3 was originally published in Sport in History, 2004, and that shorter versions of Chapters 2, 5 and 6 first appeared in Ludus, 2004, an ephemeral working paper series of the Centre. I am grateful to the editors of these publications for permission to reproduce these chapters in their revised and much expanded forms. Work on Chapter 3 was started while I was a visiting professor at the University of Queensland in 2002. I am grateful to Murray Phillips, Bruce Abernathy and Richard Tinning for facilitating my visit. I must also thank Susan Bandy and Jeff Hill for offering helpful advice on earlier versions of some of the chapters. Robert ‘Jack’ Higgs (whom many would argue is the doyen of sport-related literary scholarship) went well beyond his call of duty in providing me with much encouragement and support. I benefited greatly from his emails, or more accurately, his wonderful, lengthy, bibliographic essays. Anthony Bale, Doug Booth, Doug Brown, Mette Krogh Christensen, Jim Denison, Lyndsey Dodd, Kevin Gardner, Tom Guy, Tim Harte, John Hughson, Jerry Klinkowitz, Jeremy Nicholas, Niels Kayser Nielsen, Tim Phillips, Petr Roubal, Mark Shechner and Jeffrey Segrave also supplied generous help. A book like this is necessarily dependent on a number of libraries. I therefore thank the librarians who assisted me at Keele University, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the State and University Library, Aarhus, and the Walsall Local History Centre. At Aarhus, Stine Marie Zink proved to be a librarian of the highest efficiency. I must finally thank my editors at Routledge, Samantha Grant and Ygraine Cadlock, who have helped greatly in the production of this book, from proposal to publication. In an essay, suggests Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘facts and ideas are imaginatively but responsibly laid out and explored; then, of necessity, comes the further focussing on a particular problem and its detailed analysis’.1 In this spirit I hope readers of the following essays will feel able to take part in this process by responding accordingly.

List of permissions

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reproduce the following figures: ● ● ●

Figure 5.2 Figure 6.1 Figure 7.1.

However, at the time of publication, any copyright holders for this material have not been found. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not acknowledged here, and will undertake to rectify any omissions in future editions of the book.

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Sport and literature

Sport must not be understood as a stable, monolithic cultural institution but as a site or sites where creative resistances are practiced, bringing the process of struggle to the forefront of popular culture. Charles Fruehling Springwood1

Despite scandals, abuses and crises, the popularity of competitive, top-level sports shows little sign of abating. Members of the ‘academic world’ who are disenchanted with the sporting scene are outnumbered in the debate over values in sports, even when sports writers and sports workers themselves reinforce scholarly perspectives. Those who have spoken out against modern sport are often regarded as muckrakers, spoilsports, miseries or wimps. However, little has been done to explore the variety of oppositional voices that contest the status quo view that ‘sport’ is a ‘good thing’. This book seeks to start filling this lacuna. In the pages and chapters that follow I do not draw, to any extent, on the work, theory and thoughts of sports journalists or sports scholars. Instead I take a somewhat unusual approach by exploring the writings and attitudes of a number of distinguished writers and poets who have, directly and indirectly, explicitly and implicitly, critiqued the cult of modern sport. In so doing I hope to widen discussion on the role of sport in the modern world. Philosophers have agonised over the meaning of ‘sport’ and in defining the scope of this book I was tempted to refer to a number of scholars who have offered various definitions, classifications or configurations of body-cultural practices.2 However, I do not intend to add to their number. Nonetheless, I must admit that there is something attractive about the idea that infantile ‘play’ and professional ‘sports’ are philosophically, ideologically and fundamentally different and can be read as the respective ends of a ‘ladder of aspiration or pretension, at one end of which are the exuberantly or crassly playful and at the other the deeply serious and real’.3 But given the opacity of words like ‘sport’ and ‘play’, ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ (note how professional sportspeople are ‘working’ at ‘playing’ and notice how the Olympic Games include sports), I will use ‘sport’ rather loosely.4

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The sport ethic In plotting the broad lineaments of the history of body-cultural practices it is evident that from the 1850s onwards competitive, achievement-orientated sport was a highly desirable corporeal phenomenon. It is easy to see why sports were lauded, promoted and prized. It was thought that they taught the nation to ‘play the game’, to respect the rules and to lose graciously. Sport inculcated the dubious notions of ‘fair play’ and patriotism. It provided a healthy body to accompany (indeed to create) a healthy mind. It could be used as a form of social control; it taught teamwork and, possibly, chivalry. Such qualities were accommodated in what became known as ‘muscular Christianity’, a movement whose most influential leaders were arguably Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. It has been suggested that muscular Christianity first appeared in Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, ‘a powerful propaganda agent in the recruitment of soldiers for the Crimean War’.5 Kingsley introduced to literature the British hero, a man who always fought victoriously and who diffused the doctrines of Anglicanism. He ‘detested the view that bodily weakness could be identified with spiritual strength’ and greatly appreciated ‘the perfection to which manhood might be brought’.6 Growing liberalism within the Anglican Church did nothing to subdue the broad acceptance of such ‘manliness’. Though Kingsley disliked the label ‘muscular Christian’ Thomas Hughes championed it, building on the work of Thomas Arnold at Rugby School, even if Arnold’s influence on Rugby has been overemphasised.7 Hughes was captain of cricket and football at Rugby and at Oxford he played cricket for the university and rowed for Oriel College. He also became a ‘skilled boxer and a tenacious cross-country runner’.8 Hughes included an entire chapter on the subject of muscular Christianity in Tom Brown at Oxford9 but he was hardly an intellectual and deplored the notion that ‘Christianity was no faith for fighters’.10 His anti-intellectualism was reflected in his view that a game of football ‘is worth living for; the whole sum of school-boy gathered into one straining, struggling half-hour worth a year of common life’.11 Hughes’s advocacy of competitive sports privileged boxing and he believed that Christians were obliged to fight with their bodies as well as their minds. He recognised sports as forms of bonding but with each man having his place. As he said of cricket, ‘It ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may’.12 Through sports it was thought that boys could find their own level and obtain ‘character’.13 And sport, it was hoped, would help turn male children into men. It has been suggested that the publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays created a ‘powerful groundswell of a movement celebrating vigorous activity in the outdoors’.14 As a thirteen-year-old, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), is alleged to have read Tom Brown’s Schooldays in serialised form in the Journal de Jeunesse, triggering his enthusiasm for English sports.15 Coubertin was also aware of the works of Kingsley. Nevertheless, during the second half of the nineteenth century the emphasis placed on competitive sports reached a point that frightened even Hughes but this in no way invalidates

Sport and literature 3 the proposition that he and Kingsley can be read as canonical figures in the prosport movement that was sweeping through Britain at the time. In 1870 Hughes lectured on muscular Christianity at Harvard University. In the USA a figure analogous to Tom Brown would soon be constructed in the form of Frank Merriwell, made public in 1896 by Gilbert Pattern.16 The subBrown figure of Merriwell was ‘an all round super star at Yale, who stood up to the right of the weak, led a virtuous life, was always an honourable sportsman, and invariably led his team to victory.’17 In Brown and Merriwell, it was recognised that schooling in sports prepared boys for the rigours of later life but this is not to say that American sports yarns were imitations of those of Hughes. For example, in highly generalised terms, it has been suggested that American school sports stories took place in free schools, there was a greater emphasis on community, there were no fags (in the nineteenth-century use of the word), and Americans tended to see life as a game whereas the Arnold-inspired English saw life as a battle.18 Of course, the school was not the only milieu in which sport was praised and promoted. Charles Dickens can be read as a major pro-sport figure with his writing on cricket often supplying a symbolic and scene-setting function.19 David Smith has noted that of Dickens’s several allusions to cricket, it is in the well known depiction of a match at Dingley Dell (in The Pickwick Papers) that ‘the game is celebrated most conspicuously’,20 appearing for many years on the English ten-pound banknote. Smith suggests that ‘the narrative is a celebration of a free encounter, a celebration of enjoyment, in which rules are kept to a minimum.’ He adds that in later novels such as Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House, Dickens makes brief references to cricket where it had ‘still something of the aura of a pre-industrial folk game’ that is emblematic of ‘uncorrupted innocence or of a nostalgic past still just enduring’.21 In the literary lauding of cricket and baseball there has been a recurring theme of the masking of the tensions and sickness of urban society through the construction of an idealised and mythical landscape of fair play – the pastoral ‘Merrie England’ and the American frontier.22 The authors referred to above were buttressed in their ideological support for sport by a huge number of other written works that were hardly muscular Christian but were certainly muscular and sportive. Although the religiosity of sports writing was in decline by the early 1900s,23 and was further eroded following the First World War, plenty of secular material existed that supported the sports ethic. For example, the French ‘writer-aficionado’ Henri de Montherlant felt that war and sport, with their male bonding, would solve the perceived problem of male degeneration.24 His ‘real love was sports – soccer and cross country racing, with bullfighting in the wings’ and he was particularly attracted to the female athletic body, stressing that it was the muscular hardness of the female runner that contributed most to her erotic attraction.25 In England, George Orwell’s essay on ‘Boys’ weeklies’ recalls that from the 1920s onwards pro-sports writing possessed a more worldly quality and became part of British mass culture.26 He recognised the centrality of sport in boys’ weeklies such as the Gem

4

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and the Magnet. Later, in the Wizard, Rover and Hotspur sport was likewise pivotal to the yarns carried in these publications. Exemplified by the Gem, the first group of these weeklies was set in public school contexts and featured sporting characters such as Bob Cherry, Tom Merry and Johnny Bull. The second (and later) group, typified by the Hotspur, was targeted more at grammar school boys and often featured working-class heroes such as Alf Tupper (‘the tough of the track’, featured in the Rover and later in Victor), Limp Along Leslie, Baldy Hogan, Roy of the Rovers and the nonpareil William Wilson, a sporting polymath whose astonishing results graced the pages of the Wizard. Wilson was sufficiently popular that his biography was published in book form, lacking the subsequent comic strip format that was to overtake the solid read of the written text.27 These publications largely dispensed with the school environment and their heroes were rarely schoolboys.28 But irrespective of social class, such weeklies supplied a pro-sport image to a mass audience from the 1920s to the present day, though now in much diluted form. Other forms of writing that have sustained a broadly pro-sport mentality are the huge number of hagiographies and sport-related novels. Until the 1980s only a few of these carried much literary esteem, notably those worthy works that, in Britain at least, focused on cricket. However, in the last few decades there has been something of an embourgeoisement of sports writing (notably in football), driven by the work of Nick Hornby, whose Fever Pitch can be said to have led the way towards the ‘literaturisation’ of football or the birth of the ‘soccerati’ (or impacting on the world of ‘polite culture’, as Andrew Blake put it).29 The publication of ‘respectable’ sports writing had started much earlier in cricket and the English summer game can boast among its literary luminaries, for example, Mary Russell Mitford, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden.30 And allusions to sports were common in non-sport-focused books throughout the inter-war years. Arthur Conan Doyle was an unreconstructed sports fan. He wrote that it is ‘Better our sports be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy’ and reminiscing about his life he said, ‘As I look back there is no regret in my mind for the time I have devoted to sport’.31 In the USA, sport (notably baseball) featured in several works, including those of Herman Melville and later F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Norman Mailer and Vladimir Nabokov, each of whom in their own ways further contributed to the pro-sport canon.32 Indeed, it has been suggested that Nabakov’s worldview was informed by athletic games and athleticism in general that heightened his sense of consciousness.33 More recent works (Fever Pitch and other such well received works such as Ian Hamilton’s essay ‘Gazza Agonistes’, published by the prestigious literary journal Granta) contributed to a feeling that serious sport is a benign form of popular culture. This, I suggest, is in spite of such books being more reflective than the hagiographies and they did little (if anything) to erode the popularity of serious sport. Nor has the amazing success of the Harry Potter books, featuring as they do intra-school competition and the ‘wizarding’ sport of Quidditch.34 Competition and victory are lauded in what is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Tom Brownism. Quite differently, a further literary engagement in football has focused

Sport and literature 5 on rough working-class masculinity, reflected in what might be called hooliganesque novels, typified by John King’s The Football Factory.35 Illustrating a ‘new realism’, this genre of sport writing may upset the ‘soccerati’ but cannot be read as anti-sport. From the works of Hughes, Kingsley and Merriwell to those of ‘Frank Richards’ (or Charles Harold St John Hamilton) and ‘Martin Clifford’ (writers for the Gem and Magnet), and beyond to Tupper, Wilson, Nick Hornby and Quidditch, the substantial pro-sport discourse that has accumulated over the years serves to support the status quo. By ‘discourse’ I mean groups of statements from a variety of sources and media that structure the way something such as ‘sport’ is thought about and the way people act on the basis of that knowledge. Hence, in the production of a pro-sport discourse, the words of Tom Brown and Charles Dickens mix and mingle with those of muscular Christians, recent British prime ministers and American presidents, and writers of both fiction and ‘faction’. Serious sports were strongly supported by the former British prime minister John Major, who believed that future Olympic gold medal winners should be initiated into competitive sports in the nation’s primary schools.36 Tony Blair was constructed, by his spin-doctors, as a sport-loving prime minister, even if his engagement with sport is somewhat tenuous.37 Likewise, US presidents have far from flinched from identifying themselves with positive attitudes to sports. Teddy Roosevelt advocated the virtues of strength and power developed by ‘playing the rougher and manlier games, especially outdoor sports’ and Richard Nixon loved to parade his politics at football games.38 So, serious, competitive sport has been (and is still widely) read as supplying benefits to society. Powerful institutions such as the nation’s private schools, influential authors, prime ministers or presidents tend to give such discourses legitimacy and credibility. A particular kind of sport Serious sport carries with it an ideology that promotes certain beliefs, making such beliefs appear natural, denigrating ideas that challenge it and excluding other forms of thought.39 Nevertheless, it is possible to identify writers who, while representing the canon (and ideology) of pro-sport writing, are somewhat ambivalent in this respect. Ideologies are rarely homogeneous and are often fractured.40 Even the most hardcore fan may find something to dislike about his or her favourite sport: doping, cheating, stadium relocation, hooliganism, seriousness and professionalism come to mind. None other than Dickens was equivocal about the place of cricket as a serious sport, comparing it unfavourably with play. He liked a particular kind of cricket that was opposed to ‘the omnipresence of “system” and “structure” in people’s lives’.41 In other words it was non-serious and was ‘played in a friendly fashion on what was not much more than a village green’ – improvised and amateur.42 From this it can be deduced that Dickens was, in fact, opposed to sport when it assumed the more systematised and serious forms that included the intense desire to win and which was emerging after about 1850. The move from cricket as ‘folk-game’ to that of modern sport included the

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sport’s bureaucratisation with the formation of a governing body, technologisation with the appointment of groundsmen, the covering of wickets and the invention of the lawn mower and heavy roller.43 The same developments occurred in other sports and other places. Other ambivalent contexts are, for example, the cases of those individuals who may have loathed sport at school but grow to accept it and even become fans in later life. A good example, I think, is that of Alec Waugh. His first book, a stunning autobiographical novel titled The Loom of Youth, was penned when he was seventeen years old. It is a veritable chronicle of anti-sportism and a graphic and damning exposure of life in the sport-focused English ‘public’ school of the first quarter of the twentieth century. In the words of the book’s hero, Gordon Caruthers (who initially accepts the public school ethos that games were privileged over scholarship), we ‘can see games as they really are without any false mist or sentiment, and we can see that for years we have been worshipping something utterly wrong’.44 But half a century later in The Best Wine Last Waugh admits to being a regular weekend cricketer, a prospective cricket journalist, a member of several recreational cricket clubs and an occupier of a box for Lord’s test matches. He also played a reasonable round of golf and claimed that it provided him with much fun over the years.45 Such an example reveals Waugh’s temporal change of attitude during his school career and also the difference between his attitudes towards compulsory sport at the school level and the relative ‘freedom’ to choose recreational sport in his more mature years. In a review for the Manchester Evening News of Edmund Blunden’s Cricket Country George Orwell strongly defended cricket against the left-wing tendency to read the game as snobbish. He saw Blunden as a ‘true cricketer’, his definition of this type being one who ‘shall prefer village cricket to good cricket’, in other words, a man possessing Corinthian attitudes.46 However, Orwell made other occasional references to sport, his most well known being that it was ‘war minus the shooting’. The excesses of serious sport, he felt, had nothing to do with fair play and this was notably the case in professional and international football, which, he wrote, are ‘bounded up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence’.47 In this case it was also the kind of sport that was important with Orwell accepting ‘village green’ cricket but opposing international competition. John Hoberman, in his excellent book on The Olympic Crisis, shows that even Pierre de Coubertin was ambivalent about the Olympic Games (the paradigm of achievement sport).48 He was aware of the dangers of specialisation, the emergence through scientific training of a sort of Nietzschean superman, and the impersonal, massive stadiums that he saw dominating sports’ landscapes.49 Consider also the representation of sport as found in the classic work, Beyond a Boundary, by the Trinidadian Marxist, C. L. R. James. Tony Bateman suggests that this book ‘exceeded the canonical limits of representing cricket by politicising this avowedly apolitical field’.50 As a result James produced something of a hybrid text that accommodated both the romantic view of cricket and, to a degree, a post-colonial perspective. I supply these examples to illustrate that the

Sport and literature 7 pro–anti dualism is a binary that can always be destabilised or at least muddied and upset, a theme that I will return to in the final chapter of this book.

Against the grain Contrasting with the pro-sport discourse outlined above, an anti-sport discourse is illustrated in the words of Theodor Adorno who observed that ‘sport only preserves the joy of movement, the thought of bodily liberation, the suspension of practical ends in a completely external distorted form’ and sport ‘is not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection’.51 In other words, although we talk about professional sportspersons ‘playing’ sport, the achievement-oriented form of body-culture is, at least in terms of ideology, something different from play. This view is not so far away from that of Lewis Carroll expert Kathleen Blake, who implied that sport is ‘the destructive part of play, which may turn back on the player’.52 Other writers, for example, Berthold Brecht who was far from uninterested in sports, noted that ‘real sport begins when it’s long past being good for your health’.53 Such critics may have been correct or incorrect but my point here is that they constitute part of a discourse that supplies a counter, or alternative, discourse – one that opposes the status quo. Over the years it has not been as limited and muted as might be thought. During the past two hundred years there have been a number of oppositional voices that have contributed to the anti-sport discourse. Even during the decades in which representatives and products of the ‘public’ schools championed the games ethic, a number of writers clearly revealed distaste for serious, competitive sports ranging from hunting to hockey and from swimming to soccer. This is nowhere clearer than in the many autobiographies of men who were educated in the very schools that advocated athleticism.54 The critics tended to object to the growing seriousness, cynicism, commodification, colonialism and the work-like nature of an alienating sportised body-culture. The earnestness of Victorian sportism was critiqued in the magazine Once a Week, where it was stated by A. Wynter that ‘the elastic spirit of sport no longer treads’.55 Elasticity had been replaced by solidity; permeable boundaries by unambiguously demarcated limits and lines. By the 1920s the tradition of the amateur – the lover of sport for its own sake or the good old ‘all-rounder’ – was being replaced by the specialist. The victor ludorum was being critiqued and seen as unsustainable56 and serious sport was seen to be eroding playfulness. If John Carey is correct, during the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century mass cultural phenomena such as sport were negated and opposed by many intellectuals (ranging from G. B. Shaw to George Steiner and from George Gissing to Graham Greene).57 Intellectual elites – people of ‘taste’ and discernment – scorned gross pleasures such as football that were ranked in banality with, for example, the cinema and music hall. Hundreds of private schoolboys have provided their harrowing testimonies of school sports but if intellectuals are added to their ranks, the opposition to serious sport is indeed substantial. Several of Coubertin’s reservations about sport were amplified and

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dogmatised by fascist, neo-fascist, Marxist and neo-Marxist writers and scholars. Central to achievement sport is internationalism and hence ethnic mixing, concepts that are alien to the fascist glorification of the nation, war and ‘race’. Hoberman summarises the neo-fascist resistance to serious sport by supplying five themes: ‘a nostalgia for the ancient [Olympic] Games, a nostalgia for the Berlin Olympiad of 1936, a xenophobic scorn for international ideals, a contempt for sport as a modern spectacle, and a racist disgust at the sight of the foreigner’.58 Hitler disliked organised team sports and although boxing was his favourite ‘sport’ he saw it mainly as having a ‘welfare’ function that was undertaken in the ultimate interest of aiding the war effort. It was more akin to physical education, the subject that he wanted to be the most important on the school curriculum.59 The Marxist critique sees capitalism as exploiting sport just as it exploits all forms of human activity. It also recognises that sport and its participants are intimately related to class. Hence, capitalist sport is negated in Soviet analyses as being commercialised and exploitative. Neo-Marxists see serious sports as being intrinsically bad – at best a world of bread and circuses and social control and at worst a corruption of both the human psyche and the human body. Among the most strident critics of serious sport is the American Paul Hoch who comes as close as anyone in taking an undiluted Marxist approach.60 The French scholar Jean-Marie Brohm and the German Bero Rigauer draw on the ideas of Adorno and the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists and look to Herbert Marcuse as much as Marx for inspiration. The titles of the well known books by Brohm and Rigauer, respectively Sport: A Prison of Measured Time and Sport and Work, connote the gist of their arguments.61 Another German writer, Gerhard Vinnai draws more on Freud while the likes of the American Jack Scott are somewhat less strident and rely more on 1960s counter-cultural arguments.62 From Britain, critiques of sport have come from Garry Whannel who, in a book contributing to a series titled ‘Arguments for Socialism’, sought to politicise sport by adopting an ‘old Labour’ view.63 Additionally, the work of John Hargreaves, invoking the work of Antonio Gramsci, applied a more hegemonic form of Marxism to sport.64 More recently, the Danish scholar Verner Møller has reinforced these points of view by arguing that practices such as cheating and doping are ‘quite simply a consequence of sport itself’ with its emphasis on victory and records.65 Likewise, Rob Beamish and Ian Ritchie argue that the ‘mythology that high-performance sport produces healthy, virile bodies is powerful despite all the evidence of injury and the long-term ill effects of chronic training regimes on athletes’ bodies’.66 Additionally, even if sports were more cooperative, less serious and did contribute to health and fitness, radical physical educationists such as Brian Pronger have reminded us that ‘learning a sport is never purely a technical matter’: When one is learning the technical skills of a sport one can at the same time and in the same setting – depending on how the sport culture is structured – learn, internalize, and operationalize oppressive cultural discourses, such as classism, racism, sexism, hetrosexism and homophobia.67

Sport and literature 9 Organised movements that opposed sport also included a variety of groups, notably in Germany, the Scandinavian countries and the Soviet empire, that had a preference for gymnastics rather than sporting competition. A well known example is that of the nineteenth-century Turner movement in Germany that was hostile to ‘the anti-spirit of noisy championships’.68 Likewise, in the Soviet bloc in the 1920s the advocates of Prolekult (proletarian culture) ‘demanded the rejection of competitive sports that derived from bourgeois society’ and condemned ‘all manner of games, sports and gymnastics “tainted” by bourgeois society’.69 The result was the mass gymnastics displays of the Spartakiad. In Denmark, where nationalistic gymnastics were promoted vigorously by the Nazi sympathiser Niels Bukh, his version of non-competitive body-culture seriously competed with team and individual sports for national ‘sport space’. His ‘gymnastic forms themselves expressed discipline, mental rigidity and the typical reactionary sport of the 1930s’, writes his biographer Hans Bonde.70 This form of body-culture was, however, as different from achievement-oriented sport as chalk is from cheese. ‘Reactionary sport’, in Bonde’s terms, means non-competitive body-culture. And in Germany as late as 1933 Nazi opposition to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was present among politicians and students.71 The mass gymnastic movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia were also examples of oppositional movements that sought to use geometry and order in choreographed body patterns rather than the rough and tumble of football and other competitive events (see Chapter 4). And as the European nations diffused sport to their colonies, it is impossible to estimate the kind and extent of opposition that these innovations in body-cultural practices encouraged. An important point to make at this stage is, I think, the distinction drawn by the left-wing writer and literary scholar Terry Eagleton between abstract and everyday oppositions, ‘from an elaborated system of thought to the minutiae of everyday life, from a scholarly treatise to a shout in the street’.72 Oppositional voices therefore range from the ideological thinking of neo-Marxists (illustrating the ‘system of thought’ group) who oppose sport per se, through organised groups such as anti-stadium or anti-golf movements, to individuals who write letters to the press or, as Eagleton puts it, shout in the street. These forms of opposition to sport (or frequently to aspects of sport) will be readily recognised in the chapters that follow.

An alternative canon The key texts that seek to inform students and teachers about critical aspects of sports tend to be inspired by legendary figures such as Karl Marx and Max Weber and are written by their acolytes and disciples such as Marie-Brohm and Rigauer. Within the world of academia critics of sport have traditionally been recognised as coming from the social sciences, not from literature, and it was widely felt that litterateurs and sport did not mix. The editors of a 1920s work on Sports and Pastimes in English Literature stated that ‘literary men are not as a rule great sportsmen’ – and this may indeed be the case.73 The Swedish author Sven Lindqvist

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likewise noted that ‘Writers are the sort of people who couldn’t clear the high vaulting horse at school’ and added that ‘art is often born out of early physical humiliation’.74 More recently, Steven Connor has observed that ‘Writers and artists, especially the kind that get called modernists, are not supposed to be jocks or hearties, and the locker-room and the library are normally thought of, without it being thought about very much at all, as mutually exclusive.’75 But this is very far from saying that no writers were, and are, devotees of sport as the examples of Hughes, Dickens, Monthalant and others show. Privately educated Edward Said never lost his love of tennis.76 Sport is a pervasive phenomenon and something that is difficult to avoid. Even those writers who are dealt with in some detail in the chapters that follow had some engagement with sporting practices. F. R. Leavis, the high priest of elitist culture who deplored the standardisation and levelling-down attributed to mass sports, was something of a runner, though his body-cultural preferences were likely to have been non-serious or were autodidactic forms of physical education.77 And it should not be forgotten that for some, taking part in serious sports could have been the crucial factor that led to subsequent disaffection with sports while with others it may have only been certain sports that they hated. In the chapters that follow, my purpose is to explore the work of selected novelists and poets of various political persuasions who have, intentionally or unintentionally, critiqued sport. These are many in number and, according to Michael Oriard, one of the leading American students of ‘sports literature’, the ‘majority of serious sports novels [published in the USA] emphasize the negative impact of sports on individuals and the culture’,78 the canonical figure arguably being H. D. Thoreau. In the case of Germany it has been suggested that it is ‘typical of German sports literature [...] that it refuses to celebrate sports as literal or metaphorical achievement’, a tacit anti-sport perspective.79 In Britain Anthony Trollope can be read as authoring the anti-sport canon. According to Tony Bateman, Trollope’s last novel, The Fixed Period (1882), contains the most bizarre and proto-postmodern fictional futuristic representation of cricket ever written. Set in the dystopian former British colony of ‘Britannula’ in 1980, the novel features a stylised, highly mechanised ‘Test Match’ between the ex-colony and a visiting English team: In Trollope’s futuristic sporting encounter, cricket has been transformed into pure technology: batsmen wear protective armour to avoid injury against the ferocious onslaught of the steam-powered bowling machines that are set against them. [...] Trollope had been critical on a number of occasions of professionalism and commercialism in sport, and the mechanisation of cricket presented in the novel is a caricature of these processes. [...] [B]y rendering both the Britannulan population and the British government ludicrously absorbed in the match, Trollope graphically displays an Adornian sense that organised sport was a distraction from political reality, merely causing men to serve the machine more inexorably.80

Sport and literature 11 A sample of the writing of a variety of other such writers, novelists and playwrights can be briefly used to illustrate other literary contributions to an anti-sport discourse. The nineteenth-century writer Wilkie Collins explicitly opposed serious sport by emphasising the health risks but he also recognised the excessive adulation afforded to sports stars, the evils of gambling and the associated negative effects on the individual. He argued that sports only taught the taking of ‘every advantage’ and the use of ‘superior strength and cunning’.81 In the twentieth century Evelyn Waugh revealed himself as strongly anti-sport, partly the result of the unfortunate experiences he suffered at Lancing College, his public school. Recalling his school days he states: I think few associated games with pleasure. They were a source of intense competition, anxiety and recrimination to those who excelled; of boredom and discomfort to those who were bad at them [...]. I never enjoyed competition and was glad to escape without ignominy.82 Attempts by his brother to teach Waugh cricket inculcated in him a permanent dislike for the game. In later life Waugh was ‘repelled by physical exertion and the suggestion of it in others’ and his ‘distaste for games and exercises’ determined several of his fictional subjects.83 Later in the century the working-class writer David Storey wrote the anti-sport novel (later filmed) ironically titled This Sporting Life. This also legitimates an anti-sport position and has been read as ‘one long metaphor of boredom and pain’ in which the main figure Arthur Machin (i.e. ‘a machine’) experiences a ‘sporting life’ that is ‘the setting for a caloused ego trip and its frustration’.84 According to Jeffrey Hill, the book is ‘a pessimistic text, offering the reader/viewer nothing to be admired or valued’.85 A short extract drives home Storey’s uneasiness about serious sport. Early in the book, the anti-hero, Machin, turns up for a trial for a rugby league team. Initially elated by the experience, his body gave way to tiredness: I never wanted to play again. The cold and dampness reached the very centre of my body; my hands and feet disappeared. Now a wall had been built between me and the crowd: I couldn’t hear them. The field had grown, its limits disappeared into that suffocating mist. The ground continually surged up to absorb me. I listened to the thud of my vanished feet as they pushed automatically against the earth. I hated the crowd making me suffer like this. My eyes hung out, my mouth hung open, the air dropped down my throat like lumps of filed lead.86 As Machin becomes a professional player, things get progressively worse. As is common with the fictional sports hero, ‘once attained, sporting heroism is an empty prize’.87 In the final line of the book (and at the end of his career) he says, ‘I had my ankles strapped, got dressed, and put my teeth in’:88 what a (sporting) life! And Storey’s other sport-related work, his play The Changing Room, supplies an equally dismal view. Talk among players and officials in a north of England

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Sport and literature

rugby league changing room revolves around the freezing conditions and the pain and injury that result from taking part.89 Samuel Beckett was a prolific player of sports, being a good cricketer, a cyclist, a tennis and rugby player, a golfer, a competitive middle-distance runner, a swimmer and a competitor in motorcycle trials. Yet he ultimately found sport a ridiculous activity and Steven Connor goes so far as to say that he had a ‘revulsion against sport’.90 Beckett recognised that the destiny of the athlete was ultimately to fail – the very opposite of ‘physical culture’. The ultimate failure might even be accelerated by taking part in a world of ‘debility, disability, impairment and suffering, in which sport is not so much ludic as ludicrous’.91 Beckett wrote: ‘What ruined me at bottom was athletics. With all that jumping and running when I was young, and even long after in the case of certain events, I wore out the machine before its time’.92 Additionally, Beckett may have negated sports because of the politics of the sporting culture in which he was raised. His early sporting participation was in the sports of the British coloniser – cricket, tennis and golf. He practised these at the very time that the Gaelic Athletic League in Ireland turned energetically against imperial sports and promoted the Irish game of hurling. The distinctly Anglo-Irish nature of many of Beckett’s sporting affinities may have helped in turning him against them.93 Looking further afield, another example of sport phobia comes from the French writer, poet and ethnologist Michel Leiris. The second volume of Scraps, his four-volume autobiography, is subtitled Rules of the Game and its longest chapter is called ‘Sports notebook’. In it he devotes a considerable amount of space to his dislike of sports. He admitted to his ‘ridiculous ineptitude at all sports’ and detested physical education: Would my instructors have had more success if it had occurred to them to represent these unpleasant events as formalities that no one could avoid if he wanted to become a man in the sense in which I understood it? I would hesitate to suggest this, so great was my disgust for cod-liver oil (which they made me take [...]) and so strong was my horror for certain of the exercises one had to perform under the direction of the physical education teachers.94 At gymnastics classes he made no effort to do anything ‘except to make as little effort as possible’. He ‘attended the sessions but only participated, in short, at arm’s length, without ever really involving my body in them’.95 It was not necessarily a case of physical pain but more one of shame and fear. Likewise Umberto Eco had an unhappy childhood as both a soccer player and a spectator. He was a poor player, leading to rejection and banishment from what was supposed to be ‘the happiest of competitive events’. As a spectator, he watched ‘with detachment the senseless movements down there on the field [...] for the first time I doubted the existence of God and decided that the world was a pointless fiction’.96 How many thousands of us can identify with Leiris’s and Eco’s sentiments? A passing allusion to sport is also found in Terry Eagleton’s memoir that further exemplifies a leftist view (with only half his tongue in his cheek, I suspect):

Sport and literature 13 My own personal proposal for furthering the cause of socialism would be to abolish sport. Few more crafty ways of deflecting the populace from political action have been dreamt up. If capitalism destroys human community and solidarity, it provides some powerful substitutes for them on the soccer field. It eradicates history and tradition, it restores them in the mighty annals of sporting achievement. Eagleton concludes by stating that the ‘instant abolition of sport [...] should be high on the list of every radical agenda’.97 More recently, the British novelist Julie Myerson has written an explicit criticism of sport from the viewpoint of a young girl (her former self) who recollects from her primary school days the horrors of the annual sports day.98 In her delightful memoir she recalls a discussion with her mother about taking part in the sack race for which she is unwillingly entered: Her [i.e. Julie’s] Mum says that races are healthy, that everyone should learn to compete. But her Mum’s different. There are pictures of her looking just as you’d imagine: tall, defiant, ready to run. ‘But why? What’s healthy about them?’ I ask her when I am about eleven. ‘It’s good for people to compete’. ‘But why?’ ‘Just generally. So they know where they stand. So you know if you are slower or faster than the rest. It’s fun – to push yourself, to develop stamina, to try’. ‘But I know what I am. I know I’m always going to be slow and don’t care’.99 Before sports day Myerson observes the groundsman marking white lines on the field. As a child she hoped that a flower or a ladybird did not get painted by mistake. Would they struggle along, slowly dying from the poisonous weight of the paint? It seems too cruel to do that to a small insect, just so a school can have lines for its Sports Day.100 She is implicitly aware of the ecological effects of sports’ technologies on ‘nature’. And she recognises the different configurations of a bodily action: ‘[S]he wants to run, but not in the way everyone wants her to. Not in a healthy competition sort of way but in a running-away way’.101 Myerson’s little book, Not a Games Person, is unlikely to find its way on to university reading lists for courses in sports studies or physical education – but, I suggest, it ought to. Sociologists David Rowe and Rob Connell stress the importance of different attitudes to competitive sports. They argue, with Eco, that the ‘working out of an attitude’ to sport is simply unavoidable.102 Sport is a central and compulsory aspect of schooling, especially for many boys. Enforced sport in school is replaced by the media bombardment of sport in the post-school years, bringing

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Sport and literature

‘to the surface the half-submerged indignities of childhood’ (pace Myerson) and oppositional attitudes often become oppositional voices.103 Trollope, Collins, Waugh, Storey, Beckett, Eco, Orwell, Leiris, Eagleton and Myerson represent a rather random set of the many writers who have made relatively isolated (more or less ‘one-off’) allusions or comments en passant that oppose various aspects of modern sport. It would be possible, I suppose, to ransack hundreds of texts to discover if they contained any negative allusions to sporting matters and put them together in the form of a compendium. To be sure, a considerable amount of excavating of texts has been undertaken in the present work but by undertaking a close reading of six selected authors’ written works (rather than say, twelve single books) I try to illustrate the different (perhaps unlikely) kinds of writing that have contributed to an anti-sport discourse. Before doing so, however, it may be worth considering briefly what sports fiction is, or claims to be.

What is a sports novel? Roger Robinson defines a sports novel as being significantly about sport ‘as a central subject, not a passing episode or reference’.104 Likewise, Oriard defines the ‘sports novel’ as simply ‘one in which sport plays a dominant role or in which the sport milieu is the dominant setting’.105 So Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which devotes a couple of pages to running, would not be regarded as a work of ‘sport literature’ (in it he contrasts the ‘loafers who race one another of their own free will round a stadium’ with escapees from the gulag who are ‘running after a full day’s work, with aching back and wet mittens and worn out valenki – and in the cold too’).106 And the fact that of 395 poems written by Osip Mandelstam, three concern sport, does not make him a ‘sports poet’.107 Yet such snippets and ‘passing episodes’ may be memorable and can tell us something new about sporting configurations and the feelings of athletes. Certainly, most of the works of writers discussed in this book cannot be said to have sport as their focus or central subject. It is difficult to imagine anyone calling Alice in Wonderland or some of Lewis Carroll’s letters as works of sports literature. And are novels and novellas like The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, This Sporting Life, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Roth’s The Great American Novel really sports novels? Is Sven Lindqvist’s Bench Press really a sports autobiography? Can James McNeish’s Lovelock, whose blurb describes it as an example of ‘New Zealand Fiction’, really be sports fiction? To these questions, the answer is ‘arguably not’, concerned as these works are with other things, such as playfulness, alienation, resistance, biography, joking, dreaming and becoming. Nevertheless, this is far from saying that such works fail to inform one’s perspective on sports. The desire to adjectivally categorise literary works reflects a mindset that sees book classification as a neat and tidy business, implying certainty. So, the fact that there are references to sports in a work of literature does not mean that it is necessarily read (or written) as a work about sport. That is a question of interpretation. Sport, like The Merchant of

Sport and literature 15 Venice or Hamlet or anything else, can be read in different ways and at different levels.108 Additionally, in contrast to Robinson and Oriard, for example, I look less at individual novels or poems and prefer to take the broader corpus of writing by each of my selected authors. But even then I could not label any of them as, first and foremost, a sports litterateur.

Six writers The essays presented here reveal the anti-sport dispositions of six contrasting writers: Lewis Carroll, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Jerome K. Jerome, John Betjeman, Alan Sillitoe and Philip Roth. None of these authors are given the slightest attention in the overwhelming majority of serious books on sport – its history, sociology, geography, philosophy or theory. They would certainly not have been deemed suitable for review or critique in heavyweight works such as Leftist Theories of Sport109 – and not only because they are ‘non-academic’. My selected writers are visitors to sport but at the same time they are critical voices, often looking in from beyond the boundary of sport’s field. Indeed, it may be that their outsider-ness makes them much more potent critics than those who accept the role of fan, ‘sports writer’ or sports researcher. Additionally, they tend to come from beyond the bounds of academia in the sense that the authors did not study sport for a living. The selection of writers about whom I have chosen to concentrate in the following chapters was not undertaken randomly. They are, with one exception, British and all are men. I apologise for these biases but my selection was based on my relative (if initially casual) familiarity with their writing. The gender imbalance is regrettable but Oriard’s excuse that women have written very few sports novels because they were largely excluded from what seemed an essentially masculine world of sport is not necessarily valid.110 After all, women’s exclusion from sports does not mean that they lacked attitudes towards them and who knows whether or not they referred to sport in books that were not ‘sports novels’? The ‘Britishness’ of the book is mitigated by my own background and, to an extent, by the worldwide knowledge of Lewis Carroll and Jerome K. Jerome and, to a lesser degree, Alan Sillitoe. And even Charles Sorley and John Betjeman are not totally unknown in the broader English-speaking realm. So Philip Roth is not such a token American as he might at first seem – and the chapter on Roth is almost twice as long as most of the others. One happy coincidence is that the authors that I selected are reasonably spread out over a time period ranging from the mid nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. They also represent a wide range of literary forms including poetry and prose, novel and (auto)biography. Thus, several of them destabilise what is often regarded as the objective qualities of prose. Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, as I shall call him) is mainly known as an author of children’s ‘nonsense’ stories. Charles Hamilton Sorley is usually thought of as a First World War poet while Jerome K. Jerome is seen as a lightweight, non-intellectual humorist. John Betjeman was a Poet Laureate with extensive interests in topography, architecture and town planning. Alan Sillitoe

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may be identified with running but his broader body of writing goes far beyond that, and of sport itself. He is widely recognised as a gritty, fifties realist and one of the ‘angry young men’. Many regard Philip Roth as a radical, erotic, Jewish writer, bent on exposing or ‘demythologising’ American life. Although the biographies of these writers are far from lacking in interest and relevance to this project, I have found their fictional works, their letters and their poems to be the most valuable in interpreting and representing their attitudes towards various forms of body-culture. My primary objective of this book is to inform students of sports studies about ways of seeing modern sports. I hope that through a close reading of the works of my six selected writers, new insights on the phenomenon of modern sports may be gained. They bring to the study of serious sport views that tend to turn sport upon its head. So ‘losing’ can be ‘winning’ and the concept of ‘sport’ and its history is rendered opaque. The perspectives of these writers are not necessarily ‘objective’ but they are no less so than many of those who claim to be ‘experts’ in sporting matters. My overall (but not dogmatic) conclusion is that while sport may flicker ‘with an intermittent brightness through Dickens’s life and writings’,111 it flickers as more of a dark shadow in the works of the six writers making up the bulk of this book.

2

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

How am I to get the idea of Sport into your innocent mind? Lewis Carroll1

The suggestion that there may be a trialectic between sport, physical education and play is encouraged by the life and writing of one of the world’s most-read authors, Lewis Carroll, the nom de plume of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898).2 He disliked organised sport; he took his own physical education seriously; and he loved childish playfulness. His most well known work, Alice in Wonderland, has run to numerous editions and has been translated into over seventy languages. In addition to Alice Dodgson penned Through the Looking Glass, a two-volume novel Sylvie and Bruno and numerous pamphlets, papers and poems. But first, some background: born in Daresbury, Cheshire, Dodgson/Carroll received his early education at Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire where his father held the position of rector and later chaplain to the Bishop of Ripon. Subsequently he attended Richmond Grammar School where he prepared for entry to the well known ‘public’ school at Rugby. In 1851 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained as a tutor in mathematics for the rest of his life. Dodgson and Carroll can all too easily be differentiated, suggesting a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ or a ‘split personality’ – in effect, two different people. On the face of it, the former was a mathematician and a logician with a modest academic reputation; the latter was a poet, artist, storyteller and photographer who entranced the world with his so-called ‘nonsense stories’. The former was a dull teacher of mathematics who peddled his subject to inattentive undergraduates; the latter retains the reputation of being a teller of enchanting stories and playful tales to enraptured prepubescent girls, though more than one scholar has emphatically stated that ‘Lewis Carroll was a writer who really was a pedophile’.3 Dodgson sought to improve some modern sports such as tennis and croquet but Carroll appears to have not only disliked sports but also implicitly or explicitly opposed them. Some see Carroll as ‘a rebellious escapee from the tedious sobrieties of Dodgson’.4 Others see Dodgson as a ‘regretful, pathetic man’ and Carroll ‘the triumphant artist’.5 However, this schizophrenic approach is contested by those who read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as ‘paying attention to logical principles’ and providing insights

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Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

into ‘abstract questions of philosophy’.6 In other words, his works were hardly ‘nonsense’ and there is greater congruence between ‘Carroll’ and ‘Dodgson’ than might at first be expected. For this reason, and for economy and convenience, I use Dodgson rather than Carroll.7 From an early age Dodgson loved playfulness and games. At Richmond he is said to have known ‘how to use his fists in defence of a righteous cause’8 but he much preferred inventing word and board games and puzzles. Having been educated at Rugby School he could hardly avoid exposure to the muscular Christianity that was forced on boys by the public school ethic. Dodgson’s nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, wrote: Football was in full swing, and one can imagine that to a new boy ‘Big-side’ was not an unalloyed delight. Whether he distinguished himself as a ‘dropper’, or ever beat the record time in the ‘Crick’ run, I do not know. Probably not; his abilities did not lie much in the field of athletics.9 Even if he did play football at Rugby it was probably the result of compulsion. Dodgson experienced bullying and was not happy at school.10 However, sporting prowess did exist in his family. One of his brothers, Wilfred Dodgson, was said to have ‘achieved distinction as an oarsman’ and was ‘one of the best shots of his day’.11 In this chapter I will first explore the extent of Charles Dodgson’s involvement in sport, physical recreation and fitness. This is part of what might be called Dodgson’s primary world of ‘reality’. Additionally, I allude to secondary and tertiary worlds, respectively Carroll’s narratives of Alice’s waking life and, more significantly, of her dreams.12 In doing so I show examples of Dodgson’s anti-sportism, taken from his lifestyle, from Alice and from a number of his other published works. I will also review briefly his fascination with various modifications to existing sports but will not say anything about his interest in board and mathematical games, mnemonics and wordplays.

Oxford and sport During Charles Dodgson’s lengthy sojourn at Oxford, sports (both hunting and athletic activities) were essentially masculine pursuits. However, his love of little children – his ‘child-friends’, with whom he was able to engage playfully – provided a counterpoint to the vigorous and rough manliness of Rugby and Oxford. But having spent most of his life at the university he was fully able to observe the nineteenth-century revolution in sports that has been widely associated with the private schools and the ancient universities. The seriousness with which sport was taken in late nineteenth-century Oxford is well known. In 1866 a contributor to Blackwoods Magazine expressed delight at ‘the new gospel of athletics’ at Oxbridge and it was noted that, far from being glorified finishing schools, the students displayed ‘a love of exercising their muscles and training their bodies’.13 Fifty years later, an observer from the ‘pre-sporting era at Oxford’ described the

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 19 university sportsman thus: ‘He’s the idol every week/Of a sympathetic clique/For his prowess on the River or his ignorance of Greek’.14 The University of Oxford was responsible for several innovations in sports. This was in spite of the fact that the often absurd and archaic University Statutes, first translated from Latin into English in 1845, required students to refrain from playing football.15 Even so, in 1850 the first known athletics club was formed at Exeter College and in 1880 the Amateur Athletics Association (A.A.A.) was founded in Oxford at the Randolph Hotel. Oxford University Football Club won the Football Association Cup in 1874 and was often a finalist until the 1890s. Sport was taken seriously, even in nineteenth-century Oxford and Oxford afternoons were set aside for ‘exercise’, not scholarship.16 This usually referred to rowing but rugby and athletics were also included and the practice of afternoon sports continued well into the century that followed. A.M.M. Stedman noted how seriously late nineteenth-century sport was taken: ‘Certainly the boating man cannot allow himself a large luncheon, with one or two glasses of sherry.’ Nor ‘must he be late at the river, for the “coaching” commences at 2.15 or 2.30.’ As if to drive his point home Stedman added that ‘boating as practised at Oxford is not an unmixed pleasure’.17 Given the work-like nature of regular training, appropriate industrial metaphors were applied: ‘A fine oarsman moves like a beautiful machine’.18 The principal ‘muscular Christians’ at Oxford were Benjamin Jowett, the eminent university reformer and Master of Balliol, and Henry George Liddell,19 the Dean of Christ Church who Dodgson frequently encountered, not only as his college Dean but also as the father of Alice Liddell who was Dodgson’s favourite girl friend. However, despite these contacts it would have been almost impossible for him to avoid the established Oxford sporting activities such as inter-college rowing competitions, tennis, cricket, croquet and other ball games. Indeed, it would be an overstatement to suggest that he had no interest in serious sport and those who have represented Charles Dodgson as a wimp may have downplayed a considerable engagement with sporting matters.20 More than once he was interested enough to travel to Putney to watch the inter-varsity boat race, on one occasion (in 1871) from one of the attendant steamers.21 He also supported his college rowing team by willingly watching the ‘Torpids’ or junior ‘eights’ that had been established in 1838.22 Additionally, he regularly played the gentle game of croquet, without taking it too seriously, and also had a go at ice-skating but without much success and fell badly when trying it, ‘cutting open [his] forehead, by hurrying precipitately’.23 He was not averse to watching an occasional game of tennis24 and on at least one occasion he watched the ‘athletic sports’ at Christ Church.25 He stated that ‘cricket was a game in which he never took the slightest interest’ and claimed to have played it (badly) only once when he was put on to bowl but was immediately taken off because of his inability to get the ball anywhere near the wickets.26 However, his admission of a lack of interest needs qualification. He possessed two cricket paintings and, somewhat surprisingly, a copy of Ranjitsinhji’s Jubilee Book of Cricket, suggesting at least some attention to the game.27 He also did some spectating at top-level cricket matches, for example the

20

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

inter-varsity match at Lord’s and at Oxford a match between Christ Church and an All England XI.28 What’s more, late in life he assembled a group of players for a cricket match at Eastbourne.29 But despite such seemingly frequent and varied engagements with sports Dodgson was quite adamant that he was ‘no sportsman’.30 Fascination with sport should not imply approval of it and, as I shall show, in a number of written works Dodgson opposed serious and competitive sporting activities.31 Dodgson’s engagements with achievement sports can be put in perspective. Invariably he took part in activities other than those related to sport during his frequent visits around Oxford, to London, the south coast and Cumbria and Yorkshire, for example. He almost certainly preferred such pleasures as dining with friends, visiting galleries or theatre-going. On the occasion of the 1865 Oxford–Cambridge boat race, for example, he spent the day in London but preferred not to watch the race. Instead he spent his time visiting his publisher, meeting the artist Holman Hunt and playing croquet with friends before spending the evening at the theatre.32 This example perfectly summarised his priorities in life and he ‘was certainly not imprisoned within Christ Church from the age of nineteen till his death’.33 Fitness fanatic? Although he appeared to be a duffer at serious sport, it would be quite wrong to assume that Charles Dodgson eschewed physical exercise. Far from it: in his days at Croft he had authored a poem titled ‘Rules and Regulations’ that included: ‘Be enterprising / Love early rising, / Go walk of six miles / Have ready quick smiles’.34 From his teens onward he exercised vigorously and at Rugby he impressed his headmaster with the speed with which he completed a six-mile walk.35 Dodgson was a diligent diarist and from 1855 started keeping records of his walking though these were not always quantified, either in terms of distance walked or times taken. Additionally, it is unlikely that his diary records were comprehensive. Even so, samples from his diaries supply enough information to reveal the extent and nature of his walking. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries walking was a widespread practice among intellectuals and the upper classes.36 Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful book Wanderlust lists, in addition to Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth, ardent literary walkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.37 She did not mention Dodgson in spite of the fact that he has been described by one of his biographers as a ‘tremendous walker’.38 He took regular walks over considerable distances, his favourite being about 22 miles and a few examples supply the flavour of his pedestrianism. On a vacation in the Lake District in August 1856, Dodgson and some friends embarked on a walking tour taking up the best part of a week. This involved walking over hilly terrain, often on unmarked tracks and getting lost. Taking four days and starting from Keswick, they walked the 60 miles to St Bees making numerous detours to include the

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 21 lakes and peaks. On the fifth day he went rowing.39 Walks of 10 miles were common and he would often arrange visits early, around the possibility of taking a walk. During some periods he would walk three or four times a week.40 Although it has been suggested that he took his ‘physical exercise to a point of excess’41 there are only a few entries in his diaries that suggest that he suffered physical discomfort from walking. One was at Croft where he walked to Richmond and back (about 15 miles), ‘the last mile being a most painful experience’.42 On another occasion he walked 22 miles with the last half ‘in the face of wind, rain, snow, and hail’. He added that he was ‘too lame to go into Hall’.43 He revealed a degree of naivety when he walked from near Banbury to Oxford (23 miles in 7 hours) in very hot weather, bringing on a bout of sunstroke and ague.44 But each of these examples show that he was not a fair-weather walker. In 1881 he walked, with his usual ‘somewhat stiff and jerky gait’,45 from Oxford, round Besselsleigh to Abingdon, a distance of between 17 and 18 miles in about 41⁄2 hours, averaging about 15 minutes per mile. He stated that he was ‘scarcely lamed at all’ and attributed this performance to a long walk a few days earlier (i.e. ‘training’) and partly to the soap that he had ‘liberally applied to the inner side of the socks’ (i.e. ‘technique’).46 As if to check his fitness, 10 days later he repeated the walk ‘in about the same time though the day was much hotter, and without any blistering at all’.47 And a week later he completed what he believed to have been his longest ever walk (his ‘record’?) of 27 miles in 8 hours (18 minutes per mile) but again suffered ‘no blisters’ and feeling ‘very little tired’.48 He thought that 18 miles covered at ‘an average pace of 33⁄4 miles in the hour’ was ‘quite a good pace’49 and in ‘A Tangled Tale’ he noted that walking on the ‘dead level’ at 4 miles an hour was a ‘goodly pace’.50 In 1894 he walked 171⁄2 miles in 5 hours 18 minutes (also about 18 minutes per mile)51 and in 1897, 6 months before his death, he recorded that he walked ‘seventeen to twenty miles on each of two days with only one day in between’.52 One of these was 18 miles in 5 hours 27 minutes, a similar average pace to the previous result noted above. Quite late in his life he would also walk when visiting his aunts in Hastings where, during the ‘long vacation’, he would often walk about 18 miles from Eastbourne.53 Dodgson’s walks were typical of those contemporaries who might be described as ‘purposeful walkers’.54 But how purposeful were they? And what was their purpose? The quantification and care that Dodgson applied to recording his pedestrianism, illustrated above, suggests that his walking almost possessed the qualities of serious sport. Indeed, he was an inveterate quantifier and timed and recorded his writing speed.55 His New Year’s resolution for 1858 included the desire for ‘constant improvements of habits of activity’ – the kind of statement that might be made by a serious sportsman.56 The mention of ‘improvements’ suggest ‘progression’ – walking further, or even Coubertin’s citius. Late in his life in 1892, as he recovered from a serious bout of influenza, he recalled his desire to return to his favourite 18-mile walking route but added that that his college friends were all ‘too lazy (or too fat, or too old, or something)’ to come so far with him and it was his ‘young and vigorous’ doctor who was his walking companion.57

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Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

Dodgson did not seem to internalise the notion of a ‘personal best’ but there is a suggestion in the above statement that he compared himself with others. Here there is a hint of hubris, not far off from asserting that he was some sort of unofficial Oxford champion. The kinds of results achieved by Dodgson may be best summarised as ‘something more than a dawdle but free from a sense of stress’ and not quite what Sir Adolphe Abrahams (a physician and medical adviser to the British Amateur Athletics Association) called ‘the stage of deliberate effort’.58 Dodgson and other pedestrians of his ilk (Coleridge, Dickens and Wordsworth, for example) were what Anne Wallace has termed ‘intellectual walkers’ rather than practitioners of the sportised version of walking described as ‘athletic pedestrianism’ that was also gaining in popularity in the mid nineteenth century.59 Alternatively known as ‘heel and toe’, race-walking had its professional ‘stars’. The most well known was arguably Captain Barclay Allardice, ‘the greatest of all pedestrians’ who was also a handy runner. He took part in ‘scientifically organised matches’, was trained by a farmer and his most renowned result was in 1809 when he walked a 1000 miles in a 1000 successive hours.60 However, Dodgson (in a ‘professional’ sort of way) also took care over his preparation for long walks and was aware of the danger of excess about his diet, despite dining frequently in London restaurants and, notwithstanding being curator of the Christ Church Common Room, he was careful in his alcohol consumption. At the age of 50 he weighed only 10 stones 31⁄2 pounds (about 65 kilos).61 It appears that his long-distance walking was done alone but shorter walks, often around the University Parks in North Oxford or in the vicinity of Christ Church, were regularly taken with students, friends and acquaintances. Certainly, there was discussion of social and academic matters during these jaunts but little is known about what was going on inside Dodgson’s head when he strolled alone over meadows, tracks, paths, boardwalks and roads. In his diaries he reveals that his companions on his more modest walks (up to about 10 miles) were male and female and occasionally his young girl friends. Such companions included a variety of ‘types’ – Lord Justice Cecil, Francis Roubillac Condor, a civil engineer from Naples living in Guildford, the vicar of Christ Church, Eastbourne, and a German governess.62 Walking may have provided an outlet for his various repressions but it is reasonable to assume that he was not simply reflecting on the place that walking played in his physical and mental condition. Walking may have many goals. Tim Edensor has reminded us that ‘walking is informed by various performative norms and values which produce distinct praxes and dispositions’ and as John Wylie notes, there are only varieties of walking and ‘there is no such thing as “walkingin-itself”, no certain physical motion which is, as it were, elementary, universal and pure’.63 As a result, in addition to walking alone or accompanied, it can be done on paths, roads or over rough country, it can cover long or short distances; it can be recreational or competitive and the varieties of walking make it difficult to pin down exactly the character of Dodgson’s perambulations. His walks may have been ‘discursive registers’ such as exercise or therapy or they may have been

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 23 ‘particular modes of engagement’ such as strolling or hiking.64 While walking Dodgson may have wished to achieve a heightened sensory awareness, a restoration of ‘authentic’ being, a higher state of consciousness, or intellectual focus. At least, the last line of ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ came into his head, ‘quite suddenly, during a solitary walk’.65 Walking alone seems to have been the favoured form by walkers of a literary and philosophical bent. Indeed, Dodgson claimed that ‘one hour of steady thinking over a subject (a solitary walk is as good an opportunity for the process as any other) is worth two or three of reading only’66 while William Hazlitt justified solitary walking because ‘you cannot read the book of nature, without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others’.67 However, the humanist American chronicler of the American pastoral, Henry David Thoreau, would have seen Dodgson’s walking (and that of many others) as informal physical education or the desire for healthiness and physical fitness. For the leisured Thoreau, however, his daily ‘sauntering’, taking up 4 hours at a time, had ‘nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours – as the Swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day’.68 So Dodgson’s walking was more sport-like than Thoreau’s but less so than that of the athletic race-walkers. In addition to Dodgson’s walking exploits he occasionally used a tricycle (the ‘Velociman’) for excursions taking up to 11⁄2 hours.69 He made many suggestions for its improvement, notably concerning the arrangement of the steering on the machines produced by Singer and Co., the sewing machine makers. With more than a tinge of pride he was able to write in his diary: Singer and Co. ‘consented to make the Velociman with the steering reversed (my proposal)’.70 He never tried cycling, claiming that it was fit only for youngsters. Recreational rowing was another activity in which Dodgson took part. It was so recreational that during a July summer at Oxford it could be narcotic, according to Walter de la Mare: ‘The rhythm of sculling quiets the mind and sets the workaday wits drowsing’, he wrote.71 Dodgson termed such occasions ‘boating excursions’ on which his young girl friends accompanied him with a picnic basket of biscuits, ginger beer and lemonade.72 Most of his rowing took place from Oxford. Typically he would row from Folly Bridge, near Christ Church, to Godstow, three miles away. Nuneham was another popular destination. But he was said to have ‘never enjoyed rowing more thoroughly’ than when on a holiday in the Lake District.73 These were the leisurely recreations of an unskilled oarsman. He wrote: All in the golden afternoon Full leisurely we glide; For both our oars, with little skill, By little arms are plied, While little hands make vain pretence Our wanderings to glide.74

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It was on one of these leisurely ‘excursions’ or ‘wanderings’, with his friend Robinson Duckworth (who rowed stroke while Dodgson rowed bow) and the three young daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, that Dodgson conceived Alice in Wonderland. One of the daughters, Alice Liddell, was not only the inspiration for the name of the bemused explorer of Wonderland but also the frequent object of his possibly paedophilic desire and certainly his photographic gaze. Dodgson enjoyed the voyeuristic pleasures of girl-watching as they frolicked in playful physical exercise. He records one occasion when he spent five hours in Brighton where he enjoyed the society of three exceedingly happy and healthy little girls, aged twelve, ten and seven. I think that any one who could have seen the vigour of life in those three children – the intensity with which they enjoyed everything, great or small, that came in their way – who could have watched the younger two running races on the Pier, or have heard the fervent exclamation of the eldest at the end of the afternoon, ‘We have enjoyed ourselves!’ would have agreed with me that here, at least, there was no excessive ‘physical strain’, nor any imminent danger of ‘fatal results’!75 Indeed, in a letter to The Theatre Dodgson praised the fact that ‘the days are passed when it was “vulgar” for young ladies to run’ and bodily exercise was constrained.76 The context of this writing was a debate on whether young girls should be allowed to work in the theatre but is, I think, equally applicable to those ‘working’ in other body-cultural activities. The three girls concerned above had been acting each night of the week but this had in no way affected their childish exercise and playfulness. For Dodgson, the stage play was no more work-like than the frolicsome play on the pier, meadow or beach. For these girls the love of playing on stage did not result in any physical strain. ‘It is only when “working against the grain”, he wrote, ‘that any strain is felt’.77 To be sure, this is a romantic and massively idealised image of late Victorian girlhood but in it Dodgson supplied a picture of playfulness that was missing in the rapidly growing world of nineteenth-century serious sports with its undoubted ‘physical strain’ and ‘fatal results’ as reported by Jerome K. Jerome (in the next chapter but one). To return to his own physical activity, in the last years of his life Dodgson continued to exercise by using a ‘Whiteley exerciser’, a contraption invented in the USA by Alexander Whiteley and marketed in England by the famous bodybuilder Eugen Sandow.78 Advertised in Jerome’s magazine, To-Day, it was an ‘elastic exercising machine’ with long rubber cords anchored to a wall with handles at the other end. By pulling on the handles the muscles would be exercised.79 In Ulysses James Joyce, alluding to such ‘indoor exercises’ designed particularly for commercial men in sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of muscles and produce successively a pleasant relaxation and the most pleasant reprisintation of juvenile agility.80

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 25 It is hard to think of Dodgson as either sedentary or hoping for a rejuvenation of juvenility. It is also difficult to see him engaging with the ‘physical culture’ and bodybuilding movements that were sweeping through Europe and America, even if he did own two sets of dumb-bells.81 ‘Exercise’ is the important word here and Charles Dodgson can be seen as a participant in the fitness movement that paralleled the revolutions in sports and bodybuilding. ‘Parlor gymnasiums’ had become a fad in the USA as early as the 1860s.82 Even so, Thoreau would have found Dodgson’s dumb-bells repugnant. He wrote, ‘think of a man’s swinging dumbbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him’.83 But Thoreau’s walking has been labelled ‘extravagant’ and he saw it as ‘essential’, appearing to have been a sort of peripatetic fundamentalist who, when returning from the countryside was, ironically, alienated by community.84 According to Jean Gattégno, all of Dodgson’s regime was more moderate and was aimed at ‘a respect for the “natural” life and making the best use of the body one has been given’.85 For Dodgson moderate physical exercise was a sensible and rational way of life. The Victorian values of good posture and politeness appealed to him. His walking was not an exercise in self-punishment as in the sportised version that can be read as a way of wearing the body down. Walking, rowing, swimming, skating, tricycling: but, despite his modest measurement of performance, it is impossible to visualise Dodgson taking part in a race. His body-cultural practices, therefore, clearly demonstrated his liking for physical fitness and playfulness but, at the same time, his distaste for serious competitive sports as found in his written work, the theme to which I now turn.

The Caucus-race Readers of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland soon encounter, in Chapter 3, Charles Dodgson’s literary engagement with athletic sports when he introduces a race that appears in virtually every way opposed to the norms of modern foot racing. Alice and her companions, including the Dodo (i.e. Dodgson), the Church Mouse and the White Rabbit, emerge from swimming (in a pool created by Alice’s tears) and assemble on the pool’s bank. After various bizarre efforts to dry themselves – by listening to dry historical facts, for example – the Dodo suggests ‘more energetic remedies’.86 It is a Caucus-race that will dry out the motley crew, an event about which Alice knows nothing. ‘The best way to explain it is to do it’,87 retorts the Dodo in the tradition of learning-by-doing. The protocols, such as they are, of the Caucus-race were outlined by the Dodo as follows. First, the racecourse was circular though the exact shape didn’t really matter; second, the participants did not toe a starting line but were ‘placed along the course, here and there’; and third, they could start and stop running when they liked. After half an hour the Dodo stopped the race and, as might be expected from the norms of achievement sport, the assembled crowd asked who had won. To this the Dodo solemnly announced that everybody had won and everyone had gained a prize.

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‘Alice thought the whole thing very absurd’;88 hardly surprising, of course, coming as she did from the ordered and systematised realm of sportified racing and an ‘above-ground spatio-temporal perception of the world’.89 What Carroll seemed to be doing was ‘to construct a lasting burlesque of the general science of ordered form’,90 or in this case the general science of sport. As Britain entered the final quarter of the nineteenth century, foot racing was becoming increasingly ordered, organised and bureaucratised. The first cinder running track had been constructed at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 1837 and the first Oxford–Cambridge track and field meet was held in 1867, appropriately, in the present context, at Christ Church cricket field. The AAA, the organisation to regulate and govern track and field events, was founded in 1880. Races had clear rules and were defined with a well marked starting line, and finishers were rank-ordered with the leader having his time recorded, though at the time Carroll was writing running tracks had not assumed a standardised size or shape.91 But winning was important and prizes were awarded on the basis of merit. The Dodo’s description of running contrasted with well organised races on prepared surfaces. Like Alice’s reaction, some academic readers’ responses to the Caucus-race is to argue that having everyone winning is a nonsensical decision since winning entails one person beating another. However, there could be exceptions – the dead heat, a walk-over or a win by disqualification.92 Additionally, each athlete could be a winner if they achieved personal best times though for most of the nineteenth century only the winner’s time was officially recorded. Implicitly, I suggest, the Caucus-race is anti-sport. Like pre-modern body-cultures it is ‘not like a real [i.e. modern] game at all’,93 even if it looks something like one. Indeed, if ‘free choice is essential to the play spirit’,94 the Caucus-race can be read as being playful, since participants can stop when and where they like. Shane Leslie suggests that the Caucus-race illustrates Carroll’s ‘tolerant and equable beliefs’ – a version of ‘the first shall be last and the last should be first’.95 Phyllis Greenacre sees it as a solution for jealousy and rivalry, significant characteristics of the world of modern sports, while Björn Sundmark sees it as ‘anti-agonistic’, ‘unheroic and utterly democratic’.96 The race also demonstrates the deconstruction of some of the logical categories of modern sport such as start–finish and win–lose. The logical order of ‘common sense’ was reversed.97 However, opinion on the Caucus-race is divided. According to Kathleen Blake, the race ‘demonstrates the arbitrary nature of winning’.98 One only wins when the unilateral pronouncements of the pompous Dodo say so – analogous to those who dictate the rules of sport. If each runner starts the race with the intention of winning, it can be said to possess sport-like qualities. Likewise, the circular nature of the track with the contestants running round in circles does not get one anywhere, mirroring the ‘mechanical’, industrial assembly-line metaphors that neo-Marxists apply to achievement sport.99 According to this view, the Caucus-race cannot be read as an unambiguous critique of modern sport. But it hardly seems to be a paean to it either and Daniel Bivona unequivocally argues that the Caucus-race is not a contest since all contestants are winners.100 He proceeds to suggest that at the time the meaning of the word

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 27 ‘caucus’ was ‘a meeting to iron out differences in order to present a united front for exerting political pressure – a local game of political accommodation [...] rather than a contest with winners and losers’.101 In the Caucus-race modern norms of sport are inverted. Winning is de-emphasised and everyone receives a prize. In these respects it could almost be read as an anti-sport or a counter-cultural game from California in the 1960s. Seemingly alien to modern running also is the ‘race’ between the Queen and Alice in Through the Looking Glass. In it the Queen ‘kept crying “Faster!”’ but Alice felt unable to do so. What seemed strange to Alice was that despite running, the things around her never changed and however fast they ran they never seemed to pass anything. Eventually, she is allowed to take a rest and asks the Queen why she feels that she had been under the same tree all the time they were running. The Queen responded that they had been in the same place all the time. Alice said, ‘Well, in our country [...] you’d generally get somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing’.102 ‘A slow sort of country’, said the Queen. Kathleen Blake reads this ‘running and getting nowhere’ as ‘a circumstance perhaps reminiscent of the illusiveness of linear “progress” in games’103 and, it might be added, many sports. For example, for several decades track and field records remain static with relative and actual slowness prevailing for lengthy periods of time. From a modern perspective the repetitious running of laps around a track and ending up at the start best illustrate, I suggest, ‘running and getting nowhere’. Yi-Fu Tuan has commented on this sporting phenomenon in connection with the 400-metre running track. He reads a race as a project that has a beginning and an end. Such ‘work’ is linear requiring the physical organisation of space (i.e. the assembly line or the running track). Tuan notes that such space is historical and directed. Recreational space, however, is essentially ahistorical and non-directed. In recreation, elongation of space is not necessary. Tuan notes, however, that the racetrack is oval-shaped. He continues: ‘The starting and terminating points are clearly marked, but in racing the destination itself has no inherent significance; it can indeed be identical with the starting point. What is important is speed – speed in non-directed space’.104 The emphasis placed on speed implicitly suggests faster and faster until a record is broken or the ultimate speed is achieved, that is, the starting and finishing times being identical, as was the case of Alice and the Queen. The instantaneous movement of the human body from start to finish surely signifies the end of the record. The notion of ‘faster’ can also be related to the situations when expenditure of energy is unaccompanied by progress, a characteristic of many athletes who fail to improve. Less seriously but in another racing context, in Sylvie and Bruno Dodgson pokes fun at sports in several ways. In the course of discussion on the subject of competitive examinations, an elderly eccentric, Mein Herr, recalled ‘Cubhunting’ in which inter-university teams of principals competed against each other in ‘hunting down’ the best students. Indeed, Mein Herr stated that ‘it was actually reckoned among the Sports of the day’105 and the analogy with ‘athletic

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recruiting’ is clear enough. Also implied is the use of ‘supplements’, fed to athletes and principals in order to improve their performance. In this case one of the principals took to a diet of suet-puddings, until his body had become a perfect sphere. Then he went out for his first experimental run – which nearly cost him his life! [...] He had no idea of the tremendous new Force in Nature that he was calling into play. He began too fast. In a very few minutes he found himself moving at a hundred miles an hour!106 Fortunately he charged into a haystack that prevented him becoming a sportinduced fatality. Kathleen Blake notes that this account ‘offers a satiric epitome of the hectic snowballing of competition, which finally makes prey of human beings’.107 Such a yarn warns against competition and speed, two basic characteristics of modern sporting life. It was the seriousness with which competitive sport was taken that led many nineteenth-century observers to bemoan the cult of sport. De Coubertin was also aware of such ‘snowballing’, seeing it among students who participated in international sports events to the detriment of their studies. Also, he considered that travelling overseas to compete in sports was the worst way to see a country.108

Queen’s croquet A similar example of Dodgson’s ability to turn modern sport upside down is found in Chapter 8 of Alice, ‘The Queen’s Croquet Ground’. It is, as Alice remarked, ‘a curious croquet-ground’.109 Unlike the immaculately manicured lawn of sportised croquet ‘it was all ridges and furrows’. Instead of the standardised balls there are live hedgehogs, and the mallets were live flamingos. The arches consist of soldiers who have to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet.110 In this extremely difficult form of croquet, in which ‘balls’, ‘mallets’ and ‘arches’ could move around, ‘the players all played at once, without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs’.111 They are ‘functionless beings’, the game being a ‘carnival of form and function, a coming apart and a rebelling against function’.112 The outcome of the game ‘is less dependent on skill than on the mobility of the subjects’.113 The chaotic nature of the game led Alice to state that it was not played fairly. In the case of anyone missing a turn, the Queen simply ordered ‘off with his head!’. Rules are lacking or contradictory; there is no waiting for a turn yet the Queen decrees execution for missing a turn. Kathleen Blake adds: ‘terms and rules must remain constant if one is to know what universe one is dealing with. The croquet game does not meet this criterion’.114 However, as Warren Shibles has pointed out, if there are no rules it is impossible to play unfairly.115 The Queen’s croquet is similar to (but, I think, more malign than) the Caucus-race in the sense that visitors to Wonderland find each of them difficult

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 29 to understand. Their embedded expectations are not met.116 In her inability to bring anything but her knowledge of modern sports to the races and the croquet, Alice is left without any means of understanding what is going on. She was caught in an Anglo-centric trap. The fact that the game is called ‘croquet’ does not mean that the Wonderland version is the same as that played in the country gardens of nineteenth-century England. How can the Queen’s croquet be read as anti-sport? Whereas sport is tidy the Queen’s croquet is messy for those from outside Wonderland. For sport to function in its modern form, the rules must be the same everywhere. In the Queen’s croquet things fall apart; one cannot be certain of anything. In modern sport we have ‘game plans’ and unambiguous rules and boundaries. As James Kincaid has observed, Wonderland could offer a respite, a play area, from the constrictions and confinements of time and space that are central characteristics of modern sports. Wonderland may provide an affirmation of careless anarchy in the face of dreary, careful logic and linearity.117 But it might alternatively be read, especially in the case of the Queen’s croquet, as a world of suffering, darkness and destruction – the Underground (underworld?). Play also has a dark side, something often ignored by those who see it as the benign opposite of the work–play binary. Not surprisingly perhaps, the malign aspects of play come out clearly in Alice. Dodgson posed the question ‘whether play, so fundamentally human, may not exfoliate a certain innate malevolence’118 while Jacques Ehrmann urges us not to forget that a ‘player may be played; that, as an object in the game, the player can be its stakes (enjeu) and its toy (jouet)’.119 Likewise, Tuan has stated: ‘Play is such a sunny word that we forget its dark side. It is bad to be “used”, but it can be worse to be “played with”.’120 In these wise voices we hear the possibility that play too can be anti-sport. Sundmark takes a totally different approach to the Queen’s croquet. He suggests that the game is a ‘difficult task’, a common quality of the heroic tale. The fact that in the end it is the King, the Queen and Alice who remain suggests that Alice has passed the test – a metaphor often used in the world of competitive sports. Additionally it suggests that Alice has ‘heroic potential’.121 Dodgson can be read as favouring disorder over order, the pre-modern over the modern. Two images that appeared in his writings can illuminate this. The first (Figure 2.1) is taken from Through the Looking Glass and shows a landscape of regular shapes, in a ‘curious country’ viewed by Alice from a hilltop. It approximates to a ‘large chess-board’, a flat surface inscribed with a regular lattice made up of equally sized squares. Alice described it as a ‘great game of chess that’s being played – all over the world – if this is the world at all, you know’.122 The chessboard is reminiscent of placelessness – anonymous and impersonal. This could be argued that it is exactly what a sports site ought to be like. It is easy to read the layout of the land and Alice’s interpretation of it: a visual metaphor for the equally ordered and rule-bound world of sport – a world of straight lines of certainty, predictable angles and regularity that characterises not only chess but all football fields, tennis courts, ice hockey rinks or running tracks. Furthermore, Alice’s game of chess is redolent of the adult world of

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progress in a forward direction, ‘submitting to the rules of an adult chessgame’.123 Her steady progress is towards a goal. In sport’s ideal type, the aesthetic of geography gives way to the anaesthetic of geometry – a ‘curious’ world indeed. The second image is alien to serious sport. It is a labyrinth that Dodgson included in a letter to one of his girl friends, Ina Watson.124 It is the spatial antithesis of the grid of squares. The ordered, unambiguous world of modern sport contrasts with the ambiguous, disorderly environment of the uncertain, playful and pre-modern, represented here as the labyrinth (Figure 2.2). A labyrinthine view of body-culture enables dance, entanglement, messiness and other carnivalesque (resistant) practices such as noisiness, singing and shouting – behaviours that oppose the sterilised ideal of modern sport.125 A Dodgsonian view of sports is very well summarised, I think, by Sharon Magnarelli: Unquestionably, the attraction of the game and sport, like those of religion and other social structures, are to impose order, the patent lack of chaos, the repetitive circularity (ritual), the arbitrary power. In games and sport this power can be continually overthrown and replaced by another, different if equally random power which like all sovereignty has authority merely because we say it does. It is precisely this arbitrary power, the invalid myth, the authority and rigidity which [...] Carroll criticize[s] via [his] humor. By patently turning our social mores into a game and by inversely or reversely reflecting our world, society and language, [he] forces us to laugh at what ultimately is not at all funny.126

Figure 2.1 Dodgsonian landscape of order and sport (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 31

Figure 2.2 Dodgsonian landscape of uncertainty and anti-sport (Lewis Carroll, from a letter to Ina Watson)

Cricket in the parks If the Caucus-race and the Queen’s croquet of the secondary world can be read as being ambiguous, in 1867 Dodgson, back in the primary world, penned a strong and unambiguous opposition to one of the major dimensions of modern sport, that is, its colonisation of leisure and recreational spaces. The University’s vice chancellor had decreed that pitches for the university cricket club should be laid out in part of the University Parks, an area of open space in (what was then) the northern part of the city of Oxford. Here was a place where town and gown could engage in ‘humble happiness’ – where a ‘rustic couple’ would mix and mingle with ‘whisp’ring lovers’, ‘tiny urchins’ and ‘prattling babes’127 – a kind of heterotopia (a term I expand on later). Dodgson, by then an established Oxford figure, strongly objected to the proposal that such recreational space should be taken over by modern sport, in doing so restricting access to the countryside. His opposition was presented in the form of a verse titled ‘The Deserted Parks’. In his diary he recorded that he ‘worked out an idea that had occurred to [him] in the course of the day [...] of adapting some of the “Deserted Village” [by Oliver Goldsmith], and by one in the morning [...] had completed about a hundred lines’.128 Three days later he received 100 copies of the poem from a local printer, half of which he distributed to various college common rooms. In ‘The Deserted Parks’, the quintessential English game of cricket, frequently presented as part of the pastoral idyll, was re-presented as a tyrannical symbol of modernity. The essence of his case was made as follows:

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Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll ‘Solitudinem faciunt: Parcum appelant’ [...] Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen, And rude pavilions sadden all thy green; One selfish pastime grasps the whole domain, And half a faction swallows up the plain; Adorn thy glades, all sacrificed to cricket, The hollow-sounding bat now guards the wicket; Sunk are thy mounds in shapeless level all, Lest aught impede the swiftly rolling ball; And trembling, shrinking from the fatal blow, Far, far away thy hapless children go. Ill fares the place, to luxury a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and minds decay; Athletic sports may flourish or may fade, Fashion may make them, even as it has made; But the broad parks, the city’s joy and pride, When once destroyed can never be supplied!

In this vigorously anti-modern plea, Dodgson identifies some of the key characteristics of the emerging sports landscape. The university’s plan, together with the new horticultural technology, would reduce the natural ‘mounds’ to an isotropic plane, a perfect surface, the neutralised ‘shapeless level’, or the sporting equivalent of the anaesthetised laboratory from which nature is excluded for the purposes of the science of sport. A form of lawnmower had been invented as early as 1830 and by the 1890s mowers became widely available.129 The heavy roller was introduced in 1870, three years after the poem was written. ‘Space for the game, and all its instruments’ was required, as was space for pavilions and for scorers’ tents. ‘Verdure’ was reduced to ‘arid waste’. A socially inclusive part of Oxford – a much-loved place – would, in part at least, become a modern, monocultural space where ‘exclusive sports are seen’. Dodgson added, ‘Indignant spurns the rustic from the green; / While through the plain, consigned to silence all, / In barren splendour flits the russet ball’. Dodgson hoped that ‘independent votes may win the day / Even against the potent spell of “Play”!’130 The University congregation rejected the decree. The ‘devastation’ of the Parks was put on hold and the possibility that ‘rural Virtues [would] leave the city’131 was prevented. Dodgson’s action against the proposal was an act of resistance though the extent to which his promptly penned poem contributed to the rejection is unknown. His action, however, scarcely supports Morton Cohen’s contention that Dodgson was a ‘cricket fan’.132 Carroll revealed a concern for the pastoral rather than the suburban and the young girls’ ‘arcadian wonderland’ rather than the ‘male athleticism of organised sport’.133 Nevertheless, the hegemony of modernity prevailed. From 1881 cricket was played in the Parks where facilities were established, including level pitches and an impressive pavilion designed by T. C. Jackson. Ironically, today the first-class cricket field and its

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 33 adjacent pavilion represent for twentieth-first century Oxford visitors the quintessence of a mythical Merrie England.134

Anti-hunting Charles Dodgson’s vigorous opposition to cricket in the Parks was more than matched by his writing that opposed hunting, a long-established English sport pitching humans against animals. As a student at Oxford he had avoided the ‘rough’ and uncouth life of some of the sporting undergraduates who were devoted to hunting and the debauched lifestyle that accompanied it.135 He had seriously contemplated writing a monograph on the ‘Morality of Sport’ (‘viewed from the standpoint of the humanitarian’)136 but ‘found it too big a subject to deal with’.137 In his lesser-known work Sylvie and Bruno, he alluded to the ‘wild terror and a death of agony’ that faces a ‘defenceless creature’ when exposed to the hunter who finds pleasure in such killing.138 Later in the work, he described the horror experienced by a young girl on seeing a hare, shot dead by hunters. Dodgson alludes to hunting as a widespread practice, noting the (perverse) enjoyment found in ‘the running, and the fighting, and the shouting, and the danger’.139 His most explicit hostility to animal sport appeared in articles on ‘Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection’140 and ‘Vivisection as a Sign of the Times’.141 In likening hunting to vivisection he presented a number of propositions that he sought to refute, one being that the pain inflicted on an animal in vivisection is not greater than that in sport. He accepted skilful shooting and even fishing but for older forms of sport, and especially for hunting, he had no defence to offer, believing that they involve ‘very great cruelty’.142 Dodgson continued to refer to sport, arguing that inflicting pain has a demoralising effect on the perpetrator. Familiarity with the infliction of pain, Dodgson argued, becomes ‘first, a matter of indifference, then a subject of morbid interest, then a positive pleasure, and then a ghastly and ferocious delight’.143 It is, then, the degradation of the human that concerns him, as much as the pain in the animal. He could as well have been talking about boxing spectators and indeed argued that ‘the influence we dread [i.e. ‘ferocious delight’] is already at work among our sportsmen’.144 The delight of athletes suffering is, for many, part of the enjoyment of sport spectatorship. Although he never got round to writing his planned magnum opus on sport, he summarised his views and concentrated on pain as the central theme: ‘God has not given to man the right to inflict pain, unless when necessary: that mere pleasure, or advantage, does not constitute such a necessity, that pain inflicted for the purposes of Sport, is cruel and therefore wrong’.145 Kathleen Blake summarises Dodgson’s view of sport ‘as the ultimate manifestation of an amoral and self-aggrandizing strain in play and games’.146 By ‘sport’ Dodgson implicitly meant ‘field sports’, notably hunting, and almost certainly activities like cockfighting, bullfighting and hare coursing. To these could be logically added horse racing, rodeo and human sports such as boxing, particularly if the activities of boxers, trainers and others ‘are protected under the false labels of work and duty’.147 Indeed, contemporary discussions of pain in sport suggest that

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Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

all competitive or serious sports exhibit the infliction of pain, in various degrees, to all contestants. Pain can be read as one of the essences of modern sport.148 Dodgson did not object to the killing of ‘the lower animals’ by a painless death. It was the infliction of pain that troubled him. He felt that inflicting pain produced demoralisation and brutalisation for the person meting it out. Hence sports encouraging pain should be banned. But in the modern world of sport, how far would he have gone? In his book The White Knight, Alexander Taylor argues that Dodgson’s views on vivisection (and hunting) need to be read in connection with the 1870 Education Act that introduced secular state education and was to inculcate not only knowledge but also a ‘high morality’.149 He saw vivisection, and by implication hunting, as a sign of the times. Whereas the vivisectionist would say ‘You shall suffer that I may know’,150 the hunter might say ‘You shall suffer that I may enjoy’. Dodgson visualised a secular education that would lead to a privileging and the worship of the self, the disappearance of religion, and scientists who would rule the world. A mirror of the sporting world is visible in Dodgson’s thoughts: it would move on, in Allen Guttmann’s words, from ‘ritual to record’.151 In his paper on fallacies of vivisection he wondered if it could be extended to human subjects. Taylor’s writing reminds me of Dr Mengele and Auschwitz but modern sports scientists cite the athlete as the perfect example of a cyborg – a body on which experiments are made and reconstructions applied.152 And there are few cultural activities than sport in which the self is more central. In Sylvie and Bruno Dodgson implicitly alludes to the problem of dominance in sport (inferring unfair advantage) – the ‘inborn impulse of creatures to dominate others even when utilitarian self-interest is lacking’.153 He takes the example of a cat playing with a mouse in which the cat assumes that the mouse likes to play. However, to the outsider the competition is seen to be uneven and is not freely entered into by both parties. Indeed, the unbalanced nature of games and sports is implied in much of Dodgson’s writing, suggesting that both animal sports and their human equivalents have a strong tendency to be intrinsically unfair. Obliquely perhaps, he is raising fundamental questions about the impossibility of the widely held, but (I think) spurious, tenet of ‘fair play’.

Playing around with sports In a letter of 1873 Charles Dodgson observed that, with regard to dancing, ‘I never dance, unless I am allowed to do it in my own peculiar way’.154 The same attitude, I think, applied to the cognate body-culture of sports. He preferred doing things his way. Dodgson was far from averse to applying his mathematical expertise to the sports he saw going on around him. He criticised the colonisation of the landscape for serious sports (e.g. cricket) but, rather paradoxically, saw ways of improving sports and making them more efficient or fairer. The most carefully documented example is his observations made at a lawn tennis tournament. As a spectator,

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 35 the present method of assigning prizes was brought to [his] attention by the lamentations of one of the Players who had been beaten (and had thus lost all chance of a prize) early in the contest, and who had the mortification of seeing the 2nd prize carried off by a Player he knew to be quite inferior to himself.155 The result of this conversation was a project by which Dodgson sought to improve the method of assigning prizes. It was, he said, ‘the best experiment I have made’ and it was an assignment to which he devoted considerable time.156 He suggested that the most practicable form ‘for a true method’ would be to have 32 competitors, three prizes, and half-day contests until the undefeated players are reduced to two, when they have a whole day. The first prize would be settled by the end of the fourth day, the second by the middle, and the third by the end of the day at the latest. He sent his proposals to Henry Jones who was instrumental in setting up the first Wimbledon tournament in 1878 and a referee at the same venue until 1886.157 One of the advantages that Dodgson gave for changing the prevailing rules was that his method would result in tournaments lasting less time and having more contests going on. Such a form of tennis, he stated ironically, ‘consequently furnishes the spectacle-loving public with a great deal more to look at.’158 It seems likely that a major reason for the lack of implementation of Dodgson’s plan was his extremely complicated table in setting out the order of his scheme. Derek Hudson has wryly observed that: Dodgson exposed the very rough justice of the usual method of conducting tournaments, but the elaborate system he devised could only, one suspects, be satisfactorily operated for a tournament at a Mathematicians’ Summer School [...]. ‘Let it not be supposed’, he wrote, ‘that, in thus proposing to make these Tournaments a game of pure skill (like chess) instead of a game of mixed skill and chance (like whist), I am altogether eliminating the element of luck, and making it possible to predict the prize-winners, so that no one else would care to enter’. But even this mild consolation has not served to recommend his method, which would have turned every club scorer into a chartered accountant.159 Dodgson, who applied his mathematical approaches to the achievement of greater equity, also noted that if, under his new system, ‘the very inferior Players would feel so hopeless of a prize that they would not enter a Tournament, this can be easily remedied by a process of handicapping. [...] This would give every one a reasonable hope of a prize.’160 Dodgson’s recommendations were met with scepticism. Writing in the St. James Gazette, ‘Cavendish’ (Henry Jones) and ‘Corrigenda’ suggested that Dodgson’s new rules were the equivalent of abolishing honours in whist and flukes at billiards.161 He replied by emphasising that the application of the handicap to tennis (common in foot races at the time) equalised the players. He liked the idea of equalisation but his idea didn’t catch on. And handicapping in athletics has now become almost defunct. However, the

36

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

later adoption of ‘seeding’ did cater for his objections162 and with the introduction of greater equity to tennis there are, perhaps, the dim shadows of the Caucus-race. Another aspect of sports that attracted Dodgson’s mathematical interest was betting. In 1857 he wrote to Bell’s Life (a Sunday newspaper with an emphasis on sports) explaining a system by which a gambler might ensure winning on any race. ‘The system was to back every horse, or to lay against every horse, according to the way the odds added up.’ A sporting friend, having seen his scheme commented, ‘An excellent system, and you’re bound to win – if only you can get people to take your bets.’163 More on croquet Dodgson also sought to improve the game (or sport) of croquet. Like other sports, this was apparently becoming an increasingly serious activity despite its connotations of genteel civility. In England the national governing body had been founded in 1868 and the game was included in the 1900 Olympics in Paris. Seriousness was, indeed, a characteristic sweeping through the world of sports during the period of Carroll’s life. He suggests, in the conclusion to Sylvie and Bruno, that croquet could be improved in a moral sense (i.e. cheating would be eliminated) if gambling, a practice that was taken seriously, was introduced: Look at the way Croquet is demoralising Society. Ladies are beginning to cheat at it, terribly: and, if they are found out, they only laugh, and call it fun. But when there’s money at stake, that is out of the question. The swindler is not accepted as a wit.164 Edmund Miller thinks that Carroll is here being over-earnest and that he is negating croquet. Rather, Carroll is describing croquet as it would become in the future, i.e. more serious. Even so, Miller feels that his idea of betting on croquet matches is nonsense or unimportant.165 At the same time, however, his ideas could be applied to sport per se and it may show that by taking croquet so seriously Dodgson encouraged his readers to think morally. Dodgson returned to croquet in a short piece titled ‘Croquet Castles’.166 Here he reinvented the conventional game by having two sets of balls named respectively ‘Soldiers’ and ‘Sentinels’. The ten arches were retained from the original game but in addition to the five and eight balls another set of five balls and five flags were added. The arches and flags were set up making five ‘castles’ and each player has a castle, a soldier and a sentinel. Basically the game involved each soldier invading the other four castles, in order, then re-entering his own and touching the flag. Whoever does this first is the winner. He played Croquet Castles with several acquaintances, including some of his young girl friends.167 However, as with his participation in the traditional game, he did not take it seriously and, like his tampering with tennis, his new form of croquet can be described as ‘over-elaborate’.168 Even so, a version of the game was published in the USA but with no lasting success.169

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 37 Billiards on a circular table A final example of Dodgson’s desire to change, perhaps improve (as he saw it) on existing games and sports is reflected in his attempt to modify the game of billiards (more a game than a sport, perhaps, but illustrative of Dodgson’s desire to dabble in a wide range of body-cultural practices). Hudson noted that this was an ‘esoteric game of billiards for that fabulous piece of furniture, a circular table with cushions but no pockets or spot’.170 Instead there were three spots in the form of an equilateral triangle where three differently coloured balls were placed. Hitting a cushion and then a ball scored one point for the player; hitting two balls scored two points; a ball, cushion and then ball, three points; cushion, ball, ball, four points, and cushion, ball, cushion, ball, five points. A player scoring more than one point would immediately get another shot. Dodgson added that ‘the circular table will be found to yield an interesting variety of Billiard-playing, as the rebounds from the cushion are totally different from those of the ordinary game.’ Mathematicians, but probably not billiard professionals, have been intrigued by the varying geometries of billiard tables because it can greatly influence the types of motion possible in a game.171

Concluding comments Apart from the work of Kathleen Blake, virtually nothing has been written on Charles Dodgson and sport.172 This chapter has supplemented her study. Dodgson’s engagement with physical and corporeal activity was mainly related to the maintenance of his fitness and health. This was reflected in his commitment to long-distance walking and his enthusiasm for exercising. While he clearly took an interest in the sporting activities of undergraduates, he barely participated with them and was clearly a duffer when it came to sports like cricket and skating. His rowing and walking were restricted to recreation, not racing. His distaste for competitive, serious sport is both explicit and implicit. His political opposition to the colonisation of cricket in the University Parks reflected his dislike of sporting modernity. His sentiments were paralleled, perhaps, by his dislike of ballet, which he found to be too choreographed and organised: ‘Cottage children dancing is something far more beautiful’, he remarked.173 I have suggested that there is an implicit negation of modern sport in several of his fantastical versions of running and croquet. The ‘wonderland’ was another world of sports that, depending on one’s reading, was sinister or egalitarian. Dodgson would be expected to dislike the modern sports movement as a result of his more general ideological, philosophical and psychological positions. Games (with their mathematical ramifications) and play interested him much more; if he did dislike boys and masculinity then, by extension, he disliked sports that, at the time, were strongly gendered activities. Despite embracing the modern technology of photography (which has had so many important implications for sports) he yearned for the meadow and country dancing rather than the perfected (sanitised) turf of the sports field.

38

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll

Despite regular engagement in watching and even trying sports it seems clear that he opposed sporting practices in their increasingly serious forms. He disliked excess. A playful life was much more important to him than one that focused on competition, pain and injury. However, a simple Dodgson/Carroll dualism (that is serious/playful) is disturbed by his regular, quantified, and recorded character of his walking, a form of autodidactic physical education, and his mathematical interests in tennis and croquet. Dodgson’s more explicit allusions to sports in Alice strongly suggest somewhat anarchic tendencies, totally at odds with the growing bureaucratisation of sports and games. Here his work supports the thesis proposed by Hans Lenk and Gunter Gebauer, that sport narratives can overcome or even destroy traditional norms and modes of perception and representation.174 This, Dodgson certainly did. What passes for sports in Alice in Wonderland is full of ‘dislocation, lacunae, and ruptures’ in which questions are left unanswered.175 And away from Alice, Dodgson’s work remains paradoxical. Although disliking sports, his interest in sporting games was sufficient for him to play with the rules and attempt (with little success) to improve them – in the interests of the participants.176

3

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Yet rest there Shelley, on the sill For though the winds come froely, I’m away to the rain-blown hill And the ghost of Sorley. Robert Graves1

Two people are running down the road. One may be training for the London Marathon; the other may be running away from a crime she has just committed. Consider the words of Yi-Fu Tuan: ‘If we observe only the behaviour, nothing perhaps distinguishes the one from the other.’ They both make the same bodily movements ‘though the worlds in their heads are radically different’.2 W. H. Auden said it differently: The camera’s eye Does not lie, But it cannot show The life within, The life of a runner, [...]3 Several varieties of running exist, each resulting from and contributing to what goes on inside different runners’ heads. In late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Britain the ubiquitous body-culture of running existed in many forms. There has never been an ‘essentialised’ running and it is ‘irreducibly multiple and complex’.4 However, I will suggest that there are at least three ideal types. These are running as punishment (or welfare), running as achievement and running as a sensory experience. These categories are not mutually exclusive but serve as an organising framework upon which this chapter is built. The first two forms of running are relatively well known and documented in histories of sport and education.5 The third is less well known and less represented in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing. In this chapter I briefly review the punishment and achievement configurations but concentrate on the work of the early twentieth-century Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895–1915), whose

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Charles Hamilton Sorley

humanistic writing not only critiqued serious sport but also paid attention to sports’ sensory aspects, notably in relation to running.

Running for boys Running as punishment often took the form of cross-country running, known variously as ‘the sweat’ or ‘the grind’. A compulsory run, the sweat (the term notably used at the prestigious English public school, Marlborough College) was widely enforced at a variety of public schools. Historian J. A. Mangan notes that John Ruskin’s educational writing, for example, attempted to meld aesthetic and physical education by introducing ‘long grinds’ for the whole school during the spring and autumn. That the ‘grind’ was a form of punishment is evidenced by the caveat that such running would come to an end in the summer ‘provided the pupils kept out of towns and stayed in the country air’.6 At Uppingham School, boys on runs were accompanied by senior pupils on cycles with whips, ‘lashing out at any fellow with a stitch or cramp’, or were sent on timed runs to local villages ‘with a penalty of a beating if overdue’.7 The sweat was also used as a means of occupying those inferior games players when no game was available, or as a means of occupying all boys when playing conditions became impossible. At Loretto College, one teacher observed that ‘Boys were taught to face the wildest day that our climate gives us; The north-easterly gales that made the waves break over the road; or the driving snowstorms; never stopped them’.8 Broadly speaking such running was seen as being in the boys’ own interests. Punishment was part of pedagogy. Additionally running served as a diversion that would help repress the sexual drives of adolescence. A second form of running was competitive, focused on achievement, victory and the record and contributed significantly to the notion of muscular Christianity. Before the burst of athleticism that occurred about mid-century, other forms of Victorian and pre-Victorian running included ‘hares and hounds’ or paperchasing, and other less known variants. Paperchasing was well known and widespread. A group of ‘hares’ set out with sacks of scraps of paper, dropping them in a trail that led to a finishing point. They also attempted to deceive the ‘hounds’ by setting fake trails that petered out after a relatively short distance. Arguably, the most famous allusions to running in the private schools are in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, published in 1856.9 In Rugby School, where the story is set, the Barby Run was a hares and hounds event that covered nine-and-a-half miles – for schoolboys! Such races took place over open countryside and continued in England until the late nineteenth century when championship events were held over eleven miles in distance.10 Socially aware observers favoured paperchases because they provided the runners with a chance to slow down when necessary. As a result, ‘they are better than races’ averred the prolific twentieth-century track and field coach F. A. M. Webster.11 Even so, such running was widely disliked. Rudyard Kipling initially thought that the paperchase meant ‘freedom’ and the absence of authority but it didn’t take him long to realise that it was a hated scheme in which ‘whippers-in, who were no misnomers, were placed at the rear

Charles Hamilton Sorley 41 of the throng to stimulate the puffy and sluggish [...] and to compel them to hateful exertion and spasms of unusual energy’.12 During the early twentieth century, long-distance running for schoolboys was severely criticised by trainers and coaches. Webster deplored these forms of running as ‘one of the greatest evils of English school athletics [...]; little short of cruelty and produces lasting harm’.13 It was not only the compulsory sweat that met with criticism. Track running, with its geometric, regimented and quantified characteristics, encouraged the cult of athletic competition, the result and the record. Racing, as opposed to running, was certainly implicated in the manliness movement. Kipling, who didn’t like sport but had a degree of interest in its quantified results,14 saw the timed race as a rite de passage: If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds worth of distance run, Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it And – what is more – you’ll be a man, my son.15 During the 1880s boys as young as six years old ran in serious competitions and handicap races. The sage Montague Shearman, the doyen of British athletics history, wrote that ‘we think it is neither good for the minds or bodies of little boys to run hard races at public meetings. [...] This early “forcing” of juvenile talent can hardly be considered a healthy system’.16 While, as Harold Segal observed, ‘Modernism truly became the great age of sport’, in which ‘modernist anti-intellectualism favored action over contemplation’,17 it was possible, as I shall show, for intellectuals, poets and writers to contemplate alternatives to ‘punishment running’ and achievement-oriented body-cultures. To the codes of running based on the norms of punishment and performance can be added running that is based more on the sensory experiences of the participant who would run in an unconstrained environment, close to nature and avoiding artifice. To a degree, such a ‘returning to nature’ ideology had characterised the kind of walking undertaken by Charles Dodgson and his contemporaries, intellectuals who ‘rejected the production of anything so crass as records or prize money’ in favour of walking done for its own sake.18 As noted in the previous chapter, a substantial literature specifically on walking has emerged since the early nineteenth century. However, little exists that suggests that there existed a form of running that was analogous to the intellectual walking described in the previous chapter, and anthologist Garth Battista notes that ‘fiction and poetry about running are relatively rare’.19 Indeed, running was seen as inferior and a less polite form of locomotion than walking (though there are plenty of allusions to running as racing).20 Rushing around carried ungentlemanly and unrefined connotations of excess and could not provide the pleasant perambulatory pace required for quiet contemplation à la Dodgson. The possibility of contemplative thinking and intellectual dialogue in a green and pleasant land was also more difficult while running, a form of locomotion during which it is difficult to record one’s thoughts on paper. Though Thomas Hobbes, while walking, was

42 Charles Hamilton Sorley said to have ‘a walking stick with an inkhorn built into it so he could jot down ideas as he went’,21 it is difficult to see how an analogous gadget could be adopted in running, even at a jogger’s pace. The emphasis on speed in running can be read as part of the acceleration in life per se, a trend that was found in a wide range of phenomena, from locomotives to music.22 Additionally, running carried connotations of sweat and hard work, breathlessness and exhaustion. There was also a tendency for the hardy souls who did run to keep fit to become foci for insult or mockery from urchins and guttersnipes. So, compared with walking there is little late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing that privileged running as a body-culture that stimulated the senses. A noteworthy exception, however, is found in poetry and letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley that, I suggest, represents an early advocacy of non-achievement-oriented running.23 Capturing the ‘feelings’ and senses that are stimulated by physical activity has been a notoriously difficult problem for academic writers of sport. How does one write a race, write a jog, write a free surge of running in a wild landscape or write a ‘flow’ experience? As the Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson has noted, the ‘verbal acts’ that he found were required of a scholar ‘have always ended up in the same frustration of hitting my head against the ceiling of language’.24 He tries, therefore, to be playful with words (though not in such an advanced way as Lewis Carroll – whom Olsson quotes) and utilise poetry rather than prose.25 But the difference between poetry and prose is sometimes not obvious. It has been suggested that poetry should appeal to emotion rather than intellect; that poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking; and that in poetry the language is more important than the story. However, as I shall show in Chapter 6 it is not that simple and it has been suggested that neither poetry nor literature ‘can be defined by their inherent linguistic properties’. Eagleton adds that ‘One person’s poetic device may be another’s daily speech’.26 To return to Sorley, his highly sensitive use of poetry goes some way towards catching the sensations of a certain kind of running (the sensual mode) in the written word though I must accept that his poetry is hardly experimental. However, by focusing on Sorley’s poetry and his associated letters, I think a kind of sensitivity and political awareness is revealed that is difficult to find in most other writing about sport.

Sorley and sport Charles Sorley did not only focus his attention on running. He can also be read as offering a critical voice on the growing seriousness of sport. It is probable that he would have been aware of the Olympic Games of 1908, held in London, and possibly those of 1912 in Stockholm, the latter arguably the first modern Olympic Games. He was certainly aware of the earnestness with which sport was taken in the ‘public’ schools. Yet in his poetry he placed more emphasis on playfulness and non-competitiveness than on the ‘twin modernist enthusiasms of antiquity and physicality’ that, Segal reminds us, ‘combined to revive the ancient Olympic games’.27 For the rest of this chapter I seek to read between the lines of

Charles Hamilton Sorley 43 some of Sorley’s poems and letters, excavating and elaborating on his observations about sport but interrogating in more detail those verses that contain references to sports. Sorley was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1895 where his father, William Ritchie Sorley, was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the university. Charles received his early education at home, taught by his mother, Janetta Sorley.

Figure 3.1 Charles Sorley, age twenty (Cambridge University Press)

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Charles Hamilton Sorley

Following his father’s appointment as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University, Charles, from the age of nine, attended King’s College Choir School (though it seems that he never forget his Scottish roots). He won an open scholarship to the prestigious public school Marlborough College, from which he later obtained a scholarship to enter Oxford University. Awaiting entry, however, he spent seven months in Germany, living in Schwerin and briefly studying Philosophy and Economics at the University of Jena. In 1914, at the age of nineteen, he pre-empted an academic life in Oxford by joining the army. A year later, in May 1915, he was killed by a sniper’s bullet in the major British offensive at the Battle of Loos. He was twenty years old (Figure 3.1). Charles Hamilton Sorley is primarily remembered as a First World War poet.28 His war poems are thought by many observers to be different from those of other such works, his verses seeing ‘through the romantic myth of war’.29 They are grimmer and grittier than those of, for example, Rupert Brooke.30 However, it has been noted that only nine of his 38 or more poems focus on ‘War and Death’.31 Among the others, and in his numerous letters, there are frequent allusions to several sports and, in particular, to running. His early poems ‘reveal a surprising variety of themes and are exceptionally free from youthful romanticism and introspection’.32 In switching attention from Sorley as a war poet to one with an understanding and appreciation of body-cultural matters, I suggest that his writing provides novel insights into the world of sports, though sports historians rarely refer to him. Of particular interest, I think, is his recasting of ‘the sweat’ in more benign terms but a number of sporting themes can be identified in Sorley’s writing, mainly from his ‘Marlborough period’.

Childhood, playfulness, aesthetics, athletics Sorley is said to have enjoyed a ‘healthy, uncomplicated childhood’.33 As a young boy he was fascinated by sport and was known to recite the scores of famous cricketers, learned at school.34 In doing so he was accumulating a fair amount of cultural capital, a good base on which eventually to critique modern sports. His good health was induced, in part, by a liking for the outdoor life and a willingness to take part in games and sports. He enjoyed walking and cycling and his primary education in Cambridge introduced him to the world of modern competitive sports that were, by the 1890s, well established. This reflected the interests of his headmaster, T. C. Waterhead, a man who had not only played football for the Corinthians and the Casuals, two of the best amateur teams in England at the time, but also cricket for Eton Ramblers.35 But Charles Sorley did not excel at either of these classic English team sports and never played on his school team, though he was not unwilling to take part. One of his biographers has argued that this distaste for serious sport may have been related to a lack of ambition but adds, plausibly, that it ‘is arguable that without a strong sense of competition it is impossible to excel at team games’.36

Charles Hamilton Sorley 45 In 1908 Sorley entered Marlborough College, an elite English ‘public’ school but one in which academic work was balanced by body-cultural activities so that the ‘boys’ less intellectual needs were cared for’.37 Physical education was an integral part of the curriculum. Now games began to interest him again, ‘enough to win his enthusiastic participation’.38 Among these were the standard sports of cricket, football and hockey. His sporting skills were recognised and he admired – perhaps hero-worshipped – the school’s sporting elite (the ‘bloods’).39 This was reflected in his earliest Marlborough poem (or doggerel), ‘Verses for a C1 House Concert’, a paean to the sports heroes – the athletic aristocrats – of his school. It is light-hearted and possibly ironic. Typical lines include: ‘So here’s to each one of them, as I have said, / From Cattley our Captain to Sanger our Head. / From Dyer, the captain of classroom and Gym, / To Philpot of hockey and Field who can swim’.40 Although he was said to be an enthusiastic captain of his house second cricket eleven,41 it was not long before Sorley recognised distasteful aspects of organised team sports. He came to disapprove of them because of their easy degeneration into ‘a means of giving free play to the lower instincts of man’.42 He was not, and did not want to become, competitive. On the other hand, he did not object to watching games and indeed, played rugby football for a second fifteen at the college, perhaps against his will. But it was the serious, inter-school games that ‘ate [his] heart out’ and he saw the expert player as a ‘ghastly genius’.43 Sorley seemed to have preferred rugby, loving the sensation of ‘complete physical subjugation and mental content’ that he derived from it and he also played hockey but, again, for pleasure rather than winning.44 He was fully aware of the pain inflicted during participation in achievement sport. In a letter to his parents in 1913 he observed that the half-mile was a ‘particularly venomous race [...]; neither one thing nor another – going your hardest the whole way’.45 In voicing his opposition to school life itself and, by association, to sport, he stated that we should ‘regard a man singly, at his own rate, by his own standards and possibilities, not in comparison with ourselves and others’.46 He loathed the attitude of the public school and its sporting elitism, a distaste that may have resulted from his school friendship with Arthur Bethune-Baker, a soulmate who ‘deplored the prevalent glorification of athletic prowess’.47 Writing home from his army training camp Sorley recalled boys in the gymnasium at Marlborough who ‘despised, ragged and jeered’ at the ‘few clumsy specimens’ who were unable to perform beyond anything but a modest level.48 In ‘A Tale of Two Careers’ he alluded to such non-athletic students as being ‘Retained compulsorily in hell’. He reiterated his anti-competitive ethic, noting later that ‘public schools are run on the worn-out fallacy that there can’t be progress without competition’.49 While not disliking Marlborough per se, he yet again clearly displayed his dislike of serious sport in a poem (‘Questions Expecting the Answer Yes Addressed to A. E. H.’), written from Schwerin to his friend Alan Hutchinson. In this he reminisced about his former school and used the same war-sport metaphor as George Orwell that I alluded to earlier:

46

Charles Hamilton Sorley And on the Common is there still mock war, Where many minds are sacrificed to one Small Ball, and talk of it, not sorry for Their meaningless behaviour? Is this done Still? Do they still care whether they have won?

He followed these lines with a reminder of other users of the common: the school cadet corps, ‘learning how to kill its fellow-men’ – more ‘meaningless behaviour’ that brought physical sacrifice.

Sorley, ‘the sweat’ and the ungirt runners Despite Sorley’s allusions to, and engagements with, a number of body-cultural activities, there is little doubt that his main athletic interests were running and walking (appropriate for a boy whose name meant ‘wanderer’ in Gaelic). At Marlborough he frequently took long walks and ran, mostly in the rain (it seems), over the Downs, the gently undulating chalk hills of southern England. This was said to have ‘enticed him to learn not only more of man, but more of the timelessness of earth’.50 He saw running as one of his main luxuries in life. Writing from Germany in 1915 he looked forward to returning to England when the war was over. He would ‘retain always the right on Monday afternoon (it always rains on Mondays at Marlborough) to sweat round Barbury and Totter Down’.51 One of Sorley’s biographers, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, suggests that while running ‘all the wildness and primitive history of the Downs gave him a mystical sense of belonging to the earth’.52 When asked where people found their God he said, ‘In the rain where I found mine.’53 Recurring motifs in Sorley’s writing are the English weather and the great outdoors. He disliked central heating and described it as ‘deliberate and organised stuffiness’.54 It is in the wet and wild landscape of the countryside that Sorley sensed the freedom of the moving human body. His was not a Wordsworthian, romantic vision of nature. The countryside was far from tamed. It was active, not passive. Sorley’s running could be read as part of a personal ‘fight against Sloth and Stupidity’, in a different context in a letter to Hutchinson.55 His poem ‘A Call to Action’ (in part, censored by the Marlburian) critiqued slothful teachers at Marlborough who ‘Soon after lunch ... take a chair, / And light a comfortable cigar, / And muse with languid, mild despair / Upon the state in which things are’. They ‘[...] shrink from action, still prefer / To watch, instead of play, the game’. Robert Graves was a great admirer of Sorley and in his poem ‘Sorley’s Weather’ chided those luminaries like Keats and Shelley who also found pleasure in the indoor life.56 Sorley, it seems, was not one for the world of ‘old wine and drowsy meats’ or, in Graves’s words, the ‘firelit study’ where ‘Tobacco’s pleasant, firelight’s good’.57 Despite coming from an environment of relative affluence, for him it was in the great outdoors, nature, wind, rain and darkness where the good life and the freedom of the spirit were to be found.

Charles Hamilton Sorley 47 In the context of running, Sorley implicitly made the significant distinction between serious ‘modern’ running – that is, quantified racing – where achievement and the result are of central significance, and a more sensual running focusing on freedom and release from the work-like ethic of the modern athlete. In one of his more well known poems, ‘Rain’, written when he was seventeen, he refers to the runner (himself): ‘in tattered flannels I “Sweat” beneath a tearful sky’. But no negative connotations are attached to the sweat. The ‘winter air’ through which he runs is ‘kindly’ and, perhaps, more interestingly, the same poem contains other allusions with important sporting implications. While running he sensed that: There is something in the wind That would bid me to remain Leave behind this land of time and rules, Land of bells and early morning schools. Latin, Greek and College food Do you precious little good. Leave them: if you would be free Follow, follow, after me! With these words, Sorley contrasts the joy of free running with the regimen of modern life – the segmented school day, the constraints on time and space, a life inscribed by spatial limits, timetables and bells, all manifestations of power and control. The regimen of the school is, of course, mirrored in the world of modern sport and Sorley’s description would not be out of place in the disciplinary world of Michel Foucault or that of neo-Marxist scholars of sport.58 Louis MacNeice, another Marlburian, some years later then Sorley, noted that ‘everyone [at the school] was careerist, obsessed with getting on in form and games’: ‘everyone was jealously competitive’.59 In a similar vein, in ‘What you will’ (written when he was eighteen), Sorley compares the careerist student with what he sees as the alternative of freedom: O come and see, it’s such a sight, So many boys all doing right: To see them underneath the yoke, Blindfolded by the elder folk, Move at an impressive rate Along the way that is called straight. Sorley then presents an alternative to a recurring theme in this book, the straight and narrow lines of the modern (world of achievement sport): [...] when I have a son of mine, He shan’t be made to droop or pine, Bound down and forced by rule and rod

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Charles Hamilton Sorley To serve a God who is not God. But I’ll put custom on the shelf And make him find his God himself.

At the end of his poem ‘I have not brought my Odyssey’, written shortly before his death, Sorley returns to the theme of the ‘crooked pathway’ of the meadow, hillside and valley (symbolising the pre-modern), his love of running in the outdoors, and his dislike of school: And so I sign myself to you: One, who some crooked pathway knew Round Bedwyn: who could scarcely leave The Downs on a December eve: Was at his happiest in shorts, And got – not many good reports! In addition, Sorley’s view of running was a site for freedom from the constraints of school and modern life in general (‘the youthful spirit to enslave’). Though not necessarily written with running (or sport) in mind, his distinction between constraint and freedom again clearly fits the two main configurations of running considered here. The notion of a career (the word is interesting, its double meaning being applicable to the careering runner and the planned life history) as an index of success, is dealt with differently in Sorley’s ‘A Tale of Two Careers’, a poem made up of two parts, ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’. The sportsman typifies the successful student – a ‘forty cap’ (i.e. a boy who had got a place on the football team) – that ‘has put the chap into another world from ours’. Sorley ironically identified himself with failing students or those who don’t care about winning and brilliantly summarised this identification as follows: We are the weary, who begin The race with joy, but early fail Because we do not care to win A race that goes not to the frail And humble: only the proud come in.60 Sorley also penned a rejection of the physical, competitive imperative in his ‘Verse Letter to the editor of “The Marlburian”’. He contrasted the time ‘when things were going slower’ with the age of speeding up, represented by the new sport of motorcycling that some Marlborough staff had adopted. He observed that ‘[...] beauties fade from before us / And vast machineries arriving / All the world a shrieking chorus / of Helpless striving’. His interest in slowness is matched by a number of other observers, one none other than Sorley’s contemporary, Pierre de Coubertin, who noted that athletes should seek aesthetic perfection that could be best achieved by slowing down their actions and not use excessive speed or force.61 More recently, the writer Milan Kundera in his book Slowness pleads:

Charles Hamilton Sorley 49 Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? 62 In this lyrical and romantic view Kundera reveals his thesis by contrasting loafing and ambling to the ecstatic speed of the motorbike. In ‘the past, the notion of sensuality was associated with slowness. The slower one acts, the greater is the intensity of memory. The present-day obsession with speed is for Kundera an epitome of superficiality and emptiness.’63 This view is reflected by the ceaseless (but helpless) striving that Sorley recognised and can be exemplified in the continuous search for increased speed and the athletic record, something he implicitly rejected with his stress on slowness and what today is beginning to be thought unsustainable.64 If he chose to gain the undoubted exhilaration of running fast it would be in nature, far away from the stopwatch, the manicured running track and the record. And he could slow down and stop whenever he wanted. His record would reside in his mind as a corporeal experience, not as a statistic or in tangible forms such as a medal, cup or certificate. As early as the 1880s Montague Shearman had stated that ‘owing reverence to a record because it is a “record”’ was frankly ‘unsportsmanlike’. The essence of racing, he continued, was that one man was pitted against another, not against a record. What Shearman wanted was ‘equally matched antagonists’ rather than paced record-seekers.65 This attitude not only illustrates a late nineteenth-century attitude that opposed speed per se but also the way in which an established champion of modern sport could love athletics but at the same time be critical of aspects of it, similar to the ambivalent attitudes of several of the writers dealt with in this book. When running in the open countryside Sorley was said to have sought ‘an understanding of life through his communion with nature’.66 Sometimes he ran for two hours.67 On one occasion he ‘raced the rain to East Ilsley and arrived a few minutes in front of it’.68 Swann writes that ‘alone on the downs, he could cleanse himself in the purifying elements and forget the sin and chatter’.69 Through such running he felt that one could learn a ‘sense of proportion’.70 Louis MacNeice, a contemporary of John Betjeman’s at Marlborough, appears to have felt likewise. ‘Once you got used to this strenuous effort’, he wrote, ‘these runs were exhilarating. I liked it even when it hailed – hard clean hail whipping the throat and the ears and not a bit of shelter within a mile.’71 Here again, a contrast can be drawn with modernity. It was not running to excess, the kind encouraged by ‘serious’ running. It was not a competition. It can certainly (but perhaps unwittingly) be seen as a critique of modern sports, a world that neo-Marxists label as a ‘prison’ or ‘work’.72 Indeed, Sorley also used a carceral metaphor in describing the school as ‘the prison house of prefectship’.73 The prison metaphor is reflected in the work of Brohm and the centrality of surveillance in educational (and body-cultural) practice, based on the work of Michel Foucault to whom I shall return in a later chapter. Sorley also seems to have anticipated the

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notion of ‘sustainable sport’, lacking over-seriousness and specialisation, as adumbrated by the Norwegian philosopher of sport, Sigmund Loland.74 Sorley’s running had a light-heartedness, reminiscent of distant, slower times. A story told by his Marlborough friend A. R. Gidney recalled how once, while running on the Downs, Sorley ‘lay down and slept under a bush in his shorts and house jersey, and awoke to find himself surrounded by the local W. E. A.’ (Workers’ Education Association) during the course of an afternoon’s fieldwork.75 The key statement of Sorley’s attitude to running is reflected in one of his most well known poems, ‘The Song of the Ungirt Runners’, probably written in his nine months of military training in 1914. It is a work that has been heavily anthologised and, over the years, made part of the educational diet of numerous school pupils’ English Literature classes. In J. A. Mangan’s critical view of the Victorian and Edwardian public school, he points out how Sorley mocked the formalised competitive sports culture of the private schools.76 But Mangan also seems to use Sorley’s phrase ‘we run because we must’ (in ‘Ungirt Runners’) to illustrate the compulsory nature of the sweat. However, I feel that this is misreading and suggest that it is the runner, not the schoolmaster, who feels the compulsion to run – that he is being called by nature, stimulated by an internal desire to run in and with nature. Sorley was a runner who didn’t need forcing to run. As he wrote in ‘I have not brought my Odyssey’, the attraction of the rural landscape was such that he ‘could scarcely leave the Downs’ on a winter’s night.77 Thomas Burnett Swann suggests a double meaning to ‘ungirt’, that is, ‘unencumbered by clothes or conventions, free from shackles’, and he reads the ‘runner’ as ‘one who embraces, runs to instead of from’.78 However, the New Zealand runner and professor of English Roger Robinson presents a somewhat different gloss on ‘ungirt’.79 Written as it was almost immediately before World War I Sorley would have been exposed to the heavy and restricting army uniform. The restrictions of military dress and the lack of freedom are matched by the regimented marching and the commands of military personnel. ‘Ungirt’ signifies freedom from war and the defiant joy of Sorley’s running. According to John Press, the poem is ‘an attempt to convey something of the mystical exhilaration which Sorley experienced during his long solitary runs over the Downs’.80 It has nothing to do with the compulsory ‘sweat’ or competitive running (though Sorley uses the word ‘sweat’ to describe it). Given its significance I reproduce it in full: We swing ungirded hips, And lightened are our eyes, The rain is on our lips, We do not run for prize. We know not whom we trust Nor whitherward we fare, But we run because we must Through the great wide air. The waters of the seas

Charles Hamilton Sorley 51 Are troubled as by storm. The tempest strips the trees And does not leave them warm. Does the tearing tempest pause? Do the tree-tops ask it why? So we run without a cause ‘Neath the big bare sky. The rain is on our lips, We do not run for prize. But the storm the water whips And the wave howls to the skies. The winds arise and strike it And scatter it like sand, And we run because we like it Through the broad bright land. The poem typifies, perhaps better than any of his others, an absence of modernity. There is no cultured landscape here; it is not pretty; it is threatened by storms. In this, his most explicit record of the joy of running, the runners are naked (‘ungirded hips’), nature is signified by rain on lips, the ‘wide air’, the ‘big bare sky’, ‘the broad bright land’ – ‘nature in its joyful hostility’, as Jon Silkin put it.81 Freedom, lack of constraint and a love of the sensuousness of running are revealed by the fact that the runners seek no prize. Like the wind, they run, moving freely. The runner is an amateur, in love with running for its own sake. The ungirt runner is not seeking achievement or even fitness. Sorley was aware of ‘bright-faced British youth’ who ‘sacrifice their lives for Exercise’ and become ‘[w]orn out by muscular and manly toil’. Sensory pleasures were enough. Unlike runners forced to do physical education or military training, Sorley’s runners run ‘without a cause’; they run ‘because [they] like it’. The violence of the weather is matched by the violence of the running; it is undisciplined, primitive (running wild, lost control). Running on the Marlborough Downs brought human and nature together, blurring the divide between them. As Swann puts it, the earth is not sweet and prettified but tempestuous: ‘Neither garden nor park, it is unadorned by man, untamed by his machines, and quite capable of destroying him’.82 The contrast between running in the natural landscape and on the geometrical, standardised and confined running track can be clearly recognised here and is another theme to which I will return in later chapters. Sorley’s running, unlike that of the serious athlete, was not focused narrowly on the finishing line, the stopwatch, a record or a result. Apart from the tactile or visceral pleasures of running, the ungirt runner has time to stop when he feels like it and take in the visual qualities of the English landscape – something difficult for the athlete who is narrowly focused on a race or serious training. In ‘Rain’ Sorley had written:

52

Charles Hamilton Sorley When I reach ‘Four Miler’s height, And I look abroad again On the skies of dirty white And the drifting veil of rain, And the bunch of scattered hedge Dimly swaying on the edge, And the endless stretch of downs Clad in green and silver gowns [...]83

In Sorley’s writing there is no allusion to the problems of time and space, the necessity of the stopwatch and the search for speed and records. Drawing on the writing of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Missac notes the conflation of space and time in serious running. He refers to Paavo Nurmi, the famous Finnish runner who won four medals at the 1924 Olympics and ran with a stopwatch in his hand against the clock. Missac adds, ‘One might also say, “against time”, for time, in an important metamorphosis, changes from being the champion’s supporter to being the enemy to defeat, and this change evokes the shift in Benjamin from patience to breathlessness.’84 Sorley replaces constraint by freedom. And as he wrote in ‘The Seekers’, ‘The gates are open on the road / That leads to beauty and to God’. In ‘Rain’ he alludes to ‘the happy land’, or ‘the good life’, something that we all seek. For Sorley, however, he knows that the ‘happy land and gay / Is not so very far away, / And I can get there soon / Any rainy afternoon’. A cross-country run could be undertaken at any time and did not require either good weather or specialised facilities. It could be run spontaneously, frivolously. As Robert Reinhart, observes, ‘discipline devours spontaneity’.85 ‘Ungirt Runners’ is ‘simple and elemental’.86

Germany and the army In 1914 Sorley made the decision to spend two terms in Germany, a country for which he had great affection and where he sought to learn the language and its literature. He discovered Goethe in Schwerin and attended the university that is regarded as the German equivalent of Oxbridge at Jena. He also undertook a walking tour of the Moselle valley. This visit gave him the opportunity to make an informal comparative study of English and Germany body-cultural practices. His subsequent but brief role in the army gave him the chance of comparing the two institutions with which he was most familiar, the English public school and the army. In Germany he continued taking part in the sports he had practised at Marlborough. He continued playing hockey and what gave him most pleasure, he wrote, was the existence of a hockey club in Schwerin.87 He scored 37 goals in the eight games he played for them though it is unlikely that the opposition was very strong.88 Sorley’s time in Germany led to a flowering of his sporting interests (as well as his passion for literature and writing). At various times he swam and

Charles Hamilton Sorley 53 skated; he played tennis daily, between seven and eight in the morning (‘having crossed off a rather daundering set of lectures on Aesthetik to indulge in Athletik’);89 he carried on with his running and walking, the former with the caveat that ‘I run, madly run’ only when ‘sufficiently remote and persuaded that there are no spectators’.90 While in Jena, he considered joining the local ‘SportVerein’, but found that, ‘with the usual German thoroughness, they concentrate on sport to the exclusion of all other activities’.91 Not for Sorley was the world one of seriousness, specialisation and over-organisation. His short period of time in Germany had a great effect on him. Among the things he admired (in contrast to the seriousness of the ‘Sport-Verein’) was what he perceived as ‘the light hearted spirit in which the Germans played games, their readiness to make fools of themselves, their energy’.92 He was emphatic in pointing out that in Germany his hockey differed markedly from the seriousness of that played at Marlborough. He summarised his school hockey experience with a nice distinction: in Germany ‘we play at hockey here; in Marlborough we played hockey: and I think I prefer the former’.93 It was playing that provided the enjoyment that was lacking in English sport. There, it was a case of ‘a coldblooded performance on winter evenings beneath the eyes of an Officious and Offensive house-captain’.94 For much of his short life Charles Sorley’s poems and letters give the clear impression of opposing serious sport. However, his brief acquaintance with life in the army may have produced a degree of ambivalence. Returning from Germany he immediately ‘joined up’. His job in the army as a member of the Suffolk Regiment was to train recruits. What form the ‘training’ took is unclear but it may well have included training in sports. He was soon promoted from lieutenant to captain, in part the result of saving the life of an injured comrade.95 Writing from the regiment’s training quarters in Kent in early 1915 he had noted that the soldiers ‘play hockey and do cross-country running. The latter, the best of all sports, has been established for some time’.96 He also betrayed an unusual preference for enjoying competitive sport in connection with a division and garrison cross-country race with 400 starters and twelve teams, including some ‘ex-harriers’. There was a heavy course over the rich Kentish soil, but the win went, as it surely should, to the amateur element, to the team of a county famed for its sluggishness, and in which quoits is the favourite sport. The Suffolks came in an easy first. This has been one of our many triumphs.97 This uncharacteristic display of pride in victory was tempered to some extent by his relish for the amateurs’ victory (i.e. his recruits from rural Suffolk), getting the better of the ‘professionals (i.e. the ‘ex-harriers’ of the Royal Fusiliers). However, it is not clear whether he was a member of the winning team or whether he ‘trained’ them, or both. If he had done either, his lack of admitting his part in their success was more typical than his uncharacteristic display of hubris.

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Charles Hamilton Sorley

During his time in the army, Sorley contrasted the behaviour of soldiers in their gymnasium to that of the toffs at Marlborough. Whereas the scholars at their private school denigrated and mocked the gymnastic failures, ‘in the gymnasium here (i.e. the army) you should hear the sounding cheer given to the man who has tried for eight weeks to make a long jump of eight feet at last by the advice and assistance of others’.98 It has also been suggested that despite the pettiness of army life Sorley felt that it was ‘freer and more real than the academic life he had reluctantly agreed to follow’.99 This was in spite of the incursion of competitive sports, rules, surveillance and regulations that Sorley railed against in much of his writing. Despite his critique of many of the institutions of public school life, images of running, Marlborough and the Downs remained with Charles Sorley as he neared the end of his short life. Within months of his death, he summarised his feelings in prose: ‘And so I am sunk deep in “Denkfaulheit” (mental lethargy), trying to catch in the distant but incessant thunder of the air, promise of October rainstorms: long runs clad only in jersey and shorts over the Marlborough Downs, cloaked in rain, as of yore.’100 He yearned for the ‘sweating weather’ that he would have experienced – ‘across the Aldbourne downs, across the land of Bobchicks to Liddington and home for chapel’.101

Concluding comments Sorley’s writing of freedom through running, and his attempts to represent it in poetry, suggest an aesthetic of the sublime, what Andrew Blake suggests is ‘nonverbal, non-articulate pleasure’, pleasure that is ‘available from the unfamiliar even in its extreme, terror, including the terror of inhuman landscapes’.102 Nature is full of surprises. The Marlborough Downs can at one moment be a chalkland idyll and at another be a site of raging storms and darkness. In Sorley’s running one can imagine the ‘sublimity of fear’ being part of the running experience. For the sensitive schoolboy who disliked conventional sportised running, there is the possibility that emotions have to be repressed. Non-sportised running supplied Sorley with the chance to enjoy the irrational, carnivalesque outlet of emotion – an emotion that he sought to articulate through ‘Ungirt Runners’. In his Running in Literature Roger Robinson acknowledges that ‘Ungirt Runners’ is one of the ‘two poems most often quoted in connection with running’, the other being A. E. Houseman’s ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’.103 However, Robinson fails to acknowledge the implicit anti-achievement rhetoric in Sorley’s sport-related writings and his book tends to be a paean to serious running with a strong pro-sport flavour. In the world of more popular writing, Sorley’s ‘Ungirt Runners’ has also attracted a somewhat ‘fannish’ attention, almost achieving the status of a sort of runners’ icon. For example, in his autobiography First Four Minutes, Roger Bannister (the British runner who broke Gunder Hägg’s world mile record, in doing so becoming the first to record a time of less than four minutes) used the last two lines of ‘Ungirt Runners’ as an epigraph for his final chapter. In doing so he revealed his love of running in the

Charles Hamilton Sorley 55 mountains and hills as much as, if not more than, his need to race on the measured circuit of the running track. Bannister took ‘time off’ from the regular quarter-mile running track to train in the mountains of Wales and Scotland. In his writing his descriptions of running in the relatively untamed mountains assume a poetic and somewhat romantic mode in contrast to the scientific mode adopted when describing his preparation and racing.104 At times, it may be possible to see in Sorley’s poetry the unpolished work of a youthful romantic. But his writing of joy in nature, I think, goes far beyond romanticism. His work generally can be read as being opposed the speeding up, the regimentation, the seriousness, the urbanism and the increasingly polluted nature of modern life on the one hand, and of punishment- and achievementoriented sport on the other. Sorley’s writing, I think, not only informs ways of seeing early twentieth-century body-culture. At the same time I sense that Sorley’s running informed his own representation of it. In an ‘Essay on Masefield’, written in 1912, Sorley chided a poet he much admired, John Masefield, for his poetic representation of ‘the wild joys of living, the leaping from rock to rock’. His criticism was based on the grounds that it was unlikely that Masefield had ever leapt from rock to rock himself.105 In a letter to his parents he claimed that ‘it is a sin for a man to write of the world before he has known the world’; the problem was that poets tended to write of what they ‘loved to imagine but dared not to experience’.106 Here Sorley seems to allude to the methodological problem of weighing up the relative merits of the insider’s (Sorley’s) writing of body-cultural practice compared with that of the outsider (for example, Masefield). However, writing ‘the experience’ is not as simple as Sorley suggests and even if one has ‘been there’ and ‘done it’, it is far from being enough to be able to represent it. This question is one that is widely debated at the present time, exemplified in the ‘textual turn’ in writing sport.107 Sorley, though most well known as a war poet, reveals in his broader oeuvre an awareness of body-cultural differences between the sportised and nonsportised modes of physical activity. Additionally, he identified a number of questions that resonate with concerns of contemporary interest. Sorley preferred non-competitive, less serious body-cultures. His writing in general, and ‘Ungirt Runners’ in particular, seems to evoke the ideal form of running in which enough is always enough.

4

Jerome K. Jerome

That we Englishmen attach too much importance to sport goes without saying. Jerome K. Jerome1

Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859–1927) is widely associated with his hugely successful novel Three Men in a Boat, a work that has been continuously in print for over a century. However, he was a prolific writer who published 26 books and 25 plays as well as writing for, and editing, magazines and short stories.2 Three Men in a Boat (published in 1889) has little to say about serious sports and is better described as a recreational travelogue. In his short stories, essays and journalistic wrings, however, Jerome paid considerable attention to recreational and competitive sports and to those who participated in them. The subjects of such writing ranged from Yorkshire football hooligans to country-house tennis and from drugged cyclists to blazered patrons at the Henley Regatta. Of the writers explored in this book Jerome is one of the more ambivalent in terms of his attitude towards sport. He was active at a recreational level, mixed with many serious participants and was knowledgeable about a variety of sporting practices. At the same time however, he was highly critical of late nineteenth-century trends in sport and frequently mocked sports contestants at all levels. Jerome was born in the industrial town of Walsall in the English Midlands. His father was a Nonconformist preacher and coalmine owner but became impoverished and moved his family to London when Jerome was three years old. His schooling was at Marylebone in north central London. The fact that the family lived in Poplar involved him undertaking considerable stints of walking between the different train journeys that took him to school. This may have created some stamina in his youthful body and his claims to have put distance between him and ruffians who sought to bully him suggest a reasonable turn of speed. ‘It was a life much like a hare would lead’, he stated.3 Haring about, however, is hardly a form of inculcation to serious achievement sport and his claim that he had ‘no chance of learning games as a boy’ seems plausible.4 He was ‘always a good walker’ and later he took long walks in the countryside and liked fishing.5 Additionally, it seems he took up boxing. He wrote: ‘Boxing I practised regularly for a little while’6 but this was almost certainly

Jerome K. Jerome 57 in the interest of self-defence rather than participation in organised events. Even if he had been interested in physical fitness and sporting competition it did not take him long to succumb to the vices of tobacco and alcohol. He started smoking while he was at school that he left at the age of fourteen. He later felt it to be a ‘silly and injurious habit of pumping smoke into one’s heart and liver’ but was nevertheless often seen with a cigar or pipe in his mouth.7 He was introduced to drinking by imbibing cheap claret before graduating to whisky.8 In his semi-autobiographical novel, Paul Kelver, Jerome described the kind of body-culture he had probably experienced as a boy: In a narrow strip of ground we called our garden we would play a cricket of our own, encompassed about by many novel rules, rendered necessary by the locality. For instance, all hitting to leg was forbidden, as tending to endanger neighbouring windows, while hitting to off was likewise not to be encouraged, as causing a temporary adjournment of the game, while batter and bowler went through the house and out into the street to recover the ball from some predatory crowd of urchins to whom it had evidently appeared as a gift direct from Heaven. Sometimes rising very early we would walk across the marshes to bathe in a small creek that led down to the river, but this was muddy work, necessitating much washing of legs on the return home. And on rare days we would, taking the train to Hackney and walking to the bridge, row up the river Lea, perhaps as far as Ponders End.9 As Jerome points out, these activities were improvised and impromptu, quite different from the environment of serious sports that he would have experienced in a grammar school. On leaving school Jerome worked as a clerk for the London and North Western Railway Company at Euston but within a few years became interested in the theatre and became a part-time actor. More importantly he discovered a need to write and by the age of eighteen had tried journalism and in his mid twenties was publishing various articles. Following the success of Three Men in a Boat, he founded with Robert Barr a monthly magazine called The Idler in 1892. In addition, and more relevant to this chapter, from 1893 to 1897 he edited a successful weekly magazine titled To-Day, a venture that was entirely his own. This is (I suggest) a significant source of late nineteenth-century sporting attitudes and information that sports historians seem to have ignored. In fact, it carried regular articles and notes on sports and sporting matters, notably cycling but by no means ignoring football, cricket, boxing and other amateur and professional sports. The sporting contents of To-Day ranged from sport-related stories (H. G. Wells authored a serialised yarn titled ‘The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll’) to results of various sports events plus whimsical reports on the latest styles in sports clothing such as capes, caps and stockings. ‘Golf caps will be somewhat lighter in colour this spring’, he predicted in an issue of 1896.10 Typical contributions included ‘The prize-ring today’, ‘Yorkshire games and sports’, ‘A bullfight in Barcelona’, ‘Hockey in Canada’,

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‘Through Holland on skates’, ‘Hints on long distance cycling’, ‘Wheeling round the world’, ‘The art of figure skating’ and ‘How a greyhound is trained’. Some of the articles were not attributed but it is reasonable to assume that Jerome wrote them. At least, by accepting them for publication he tacitly gave them his seal of approval.11 He was far from an idler as far as his writing was concerned and it has been said that in the mid 1880s he was working on one or more of his projects fourteen hours a day.12 However, Jerome severed his contact with both of his magazines following the loss of a libel case for which he had to pay £9,000 in costs.13 The work that made his name (and his money), Three Men in a Boat, was about a boat trip on the Thames from Sudbury to Oxford, had few sporting connotations14 and I shall barely mention it in the pages that follow. To a large degree, the same is true of Three Men on the Bummel (1900), titled more appropriately in the USA as Three Men on Wheels.15 I prefer to explore his less known writings from To-Day and from his numerous short stories. In this chapter I will first review Jerome’s various forms of participation in sports and the sort of sporting networks that made up much of his social capital. If Jerome was a critic of modern sport his criticisms were well grounded in his social and cultural fields. The second part of the chapter identifies ways in which Jerome critiqued aspects of sport, often seriously through his columns in To-Day and by poking fun at sporting practices in his various essays.

Participation and acquaintances Although on balance I regard Jerome as being anti-sport there is little doubt that he knew a good deal about several sports and practised some of them to a relatively competent level. Jerome came into contact with sport when he tried schoolmastering following an appointment as an assistant master at a day and boarding school in Clapham Road in London. His work included ‘the teaching of swimming and gymnastics, and of proper deportment’ while taking his charges on daily walks round Clapham Common.16 He continued as a recreational walker, taking to the countryside around the metropolis.17 Later in life he undertook a walking holiday in Brittany18 but during his various walking tours he ‘was so busy wondering that [he] never noticed where [he] walked’.19 These body-cultural practices were more physical-educational than sport-like. His books provided him with a more than adequate income and Jerome became sufficiently affluent to have a first-class tennis court laid out at ‘Monk’s Corner’ on Marlow Common, one of his several residences in the Home Counties. He claimed to find it ‘quite an easy game’ and became something of a fan. Jerome rubbed shoulders with eminent Victorian tennis players. A threetimes Wimbledon champion, Wilfred Baddeley, who won the men’s singles in 1891, 1892 and 1895, said that ‘Monks Corner’ had the best private grass court he had played on. An Italian champion also played there.20 Jerome also seems to have been a reasonably skilled skater, acknowledging on a visit to Germany that ‘there was good skating at Dresden’.21 However, during his regular visits to

Jerome K. Jerome 59 the Alps he referred mainly to mishaps and disasters, tending to put off the potential participant in the various forms of skiing.22 Jerome cultivated a wide circle of literary types, many of whom had strong sporting associations. Notable among them were J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Schooled at Dumfries Academy, Barrie lived in a world of sports and though slightly built was good at football, cricket, fishing and other sports. Doyle was even more of a sporting polymath. He came to appreciate cricket at Stoneyhurst School; he once took the wicket of W. G. Grace; he was a founder of Portsmouth Football Club and played in goal and as a defender until he was 44; he had a golf handicap of ten; he helped popularise skiing in Switzerland; he was invited to referee a world heavyweight boxing championship; he was commissioned by Lord Northcliffe to report on the 1908 Olympic marathon for the Daily Mail; and he was a fund-raiser to help the British athletics team which had been seen to have failed dismally at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.23 In 1910 Conan Doyle organised a ‘celebrity eleven’ for a cricket tour of Holland. It included J. M. Barrie and Jerome K. Jerome.24 But even with such illustrious sporting contacts, Jerome could only describe himself as a ‘humble sportsman’.25 Jerome lived through the early twentieth-century boom in cycling and chronicled it as both recreation and as a serious sport. In 1896 a cycling meeting at Catford (London) attracted 10,000 spectators.26 It was far and away the most commonly covered sport in To-Day that, by 1896, had established a column specifically devoted to cycling matters and included yarns that involved cyclists and cycling. Jerome’s nephew was Frank Shorland, a ‘well known’ amateur racer and an English champion who was alleged to have been the first to ride a ‘safety bicycle’ in London and was to continue to be a serious cyclist into the 1930s. His ‘safety’ cycle contrasted with the ‘spider’ or penny-farthings. He also organised the first ‘joy ride’ from the Hotel Metropole in London to Brighton.27 With the safety cycle, bicycling became the rage. Jerome observed that In Battersea Park, any morning between eleven and one, all the best blood in England could be seen, solemnly pedalling up and down the half-mile drive that runs between the river and the refreshment kiosk. But these were the experts – the finished article. In shady by-paths, elderly countesses, perspiring peers, still in the wobbly stage, battled bravely with the laws of equilibrium.28 Jerome was active in promoting Shorland who featured prominently in To-Day. He was happy to comment on the proposal that Shorland should compete against the French champion, Auguste Stéphane, in an international 24-hour race.29 The Englishman was an amateur but his French antagonist, as labelled by the National Cycling Union (NCU), was a ‘professional’. This, not surprisingly, posed problems for the NCU but Jerome’s view was that failing to allow ‘an Englishman the chance of a fair trial with a foreigner’ and the prevention of the competition by the NCU was unsportsmanlike.30 To-Day included a full-page cartoon showing Shorland and his nanny (the NCU) facing two French cyclists, Stéphane and

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Lesna. The caption read as follows: SHORLAND: ‘Can I go out and have a run with Stéphane and Lesna?’ NCU: ‘Certainly not; I won’t have you playing with those dirty little boys’.31 The suggestion of the French being ‘dirty’ did not allude to cheating but Jerome was certainly aware of doping and other performanceenhancing ruses. Indeed, Stéphane can be linked to the ‘problem’ of performance-enhancement through his links with Philippe Tissié, ‘the most important, and certainly the most prophetic, sports physician of the fin de siècle’, who authored a physiological report on Stéphane.32 The ‘dirty’ accusation was more likely to refer to professionalism, a subject I will refer to later. However, the regular coverage of cycling politics and of the manufacture and technology of cycles in Jerome’s magazine should not imply that he was an advocate of serious sport per se and he was not slow to poke fun at cycling in his Three Men on the Bummel. It seems plausible that the promotion of his nephew reflected support for a member of his family and the mild conflict between the English and the French in cycling politics would be good reading and boost To-Day’s sales. To-Day was not averse to publishing sporting statistics. Cricket, football and racing results were regularly featured. Jerome (I assume it was he) was also aware of the ‘home advantage’, a subject that would later become a well researched topic in the sociology and psychology of sport. A huge literature now exists on the tendency for sports teams to perform better at home than away.33 In 1895 Jerome wondered, ‘Are football professionals exceptionally sensitive to their surroundings, or is it possible that referees, with a view to their personal safety, give anything doubtful to the home team?’34 He also noted that the home advantage was not found in the case of cricket. His implied hypotheses generated several subsequent discussions in his journal and in the last half century have been tested statistically on many occasions. Duelling, landscape and distaste A sporting innovator who was allegedly close to Jerome was George Jenkins, a secretary of his who, Jerome claimed, introduced football to Freiburg in southern Germany. In 1900 Jerome had noted, in familiar stereotypical form, that ‘the German’ is not ‘a sportsman, which is a pity, for he should make a good one’.35 The typical German, he continued, spends his time drinking beer and fighting. He was aware of the widespread practice of duelling and witnessed it in Freiburg. Jerome described a depraved form of duelling milieu called the Mensur (fighting between rival Korps or Schaft) in which fencing took place: The room is bare and sordid; its walls splashed with mixed stains of beer, blood, and candle grease; its ceiling, smoky; its floor, sawdust covered. A crowd of students, laughing, smoking, talking, some sitting on the floor, others perched on chairs and benched, form the framework.36 In late nineteenth-century Germany a barbaric kind of ritual duelling had ‘increased in frequency and significance, playing an important part in integrating

Jerome K. Jerome 61 the rising middle class [...]. This was established and organised around a code of honour in which duelling and the demanding and giving of “satisfaction” occupied pride of place’.37 Jerome frankly admitted that he enjoyed this sport and that he had developed a liking for the ‘smell of blood’. He identified himself with what he called the ‘human tiger’, a species that ‘roams the whole world round’.38 But he also recognised that the Mensur, in particular, was a form of duelling that dehumanised the spectators (including himself) and the duellists, savages underneath their starched shirts, as he put it. A way of controlling such sporting bloodthirstiness was required. Jerome’s secretary Jenkins could supply the solution and Jerome recognised that it was participation in ‘the run of the football field and the prize ring’ where the ‘tiger’ is less harmful. To be sure, he admitted that in England sport was overemphasised and readily acknowledged that soccer and boxing had faults: but compared with duelling they were on the ‘right side’.39 Jerome welcomed Jenkins’s innovation and saw that football had an advantage over duelling in several respects. There was less risk of injury, it encouraged boys to adopt physical fitness, to drink less beer and to go to bed sober.40 There can be no suggestion that Jerome or Jenkins had any serious effect on the decline of duelling in Germany. They were caught up in a broader civilising process based on technology and a changing ethos. Critically, it was the end of the First World War that brought duelling to an end.41 Modern sports offered a new milieu where personal violence could find a social space and it was with that sentiment that Jerome felt sympathy. The ‘control’ of rough and dangerous sports was not, of course, restricted to duelling. The reduction of roughness and danger was part of what is widely known as the ‘civilising process’, our knowledge of which is principally the legacy of the writings of two sociologists, Norbert Elias and his disciple, Eric Dunning.42 Charles Dodgson had witnessed attempts to ‘tame’ the local landscape of the Oxford Parks but Jerome went further than those advocating change at the local level by describing the rationalisation of the national landscapes of late nineteenth-century Germany. As several of the following chapters show, the successful establishment of modern sport required rational spaces for comparable competitions to take place. Jerome saw ‘the German’ seeking order in the landscape, liking ‘his walk through the wood’, but where the destination was a restaurant; he ‘likes the view from the summit of the hill, but he likes to find a stone tablet telling him what to look at’; Germans, he noted, constructed a ‘mountain valley ‘as it ought to be, according to German ideas’, ‘just tidying up the country’.43 The ‘tidy land’ that Jerome labelled Germany is, of course, writ large in the landscape of modern sport that demands, through its rules and regulations, the ‘rooting up and trimming down’ of ‘untrammelled nature’: Nature has ‘got to behave herself, and not set a bad example’, Jerome ironically noted.44 Sport requires an artificial space and, as in the case of Alice’s checkerboard landscape, geometry should, according to sport’s norms, replace geography. Jerome observed that in German parks the space is clearly segmented with designated spaces for play (Spielplätze).45 In these comments

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Jerome predicts the ‘Disneyfication’ of the landscape, a landscape perfectly exemplified by the world of sport. He didn’t like it.

Oppositional tendencies It is clear from my musings above that Jerome was certainly interested in various dimensions of sports. However, it is also clear that during the first quarter of the twentieth century he recognised that sport had become much too serious, something implied by his comments on changing the landscape to one of order rather than disorder. Although many of his negations of sports are amusing it is easy enough to see a serious side to them. For example, in a light-hearted essay titled ‘Should married men play golf?’ he pointed to the undesirable spin-offs for the bride of a modern golfer,46 and more generally, for sportsmen per se. The ‘evil effect of over-indulgence in sport’ included ‘the neglected business, the ruined home, the slow but sure sapping of the brain – what there may have been of it in the beginning – leading to semi-imbecility and yearly increasing obesity’.47 There is something in this, of course, and the suggestion that sport induces brainlessness as well as broken homes and subsequent obesity is recognisable in some of today’s sports celebrities even if Jerome was applying his observations to the amateur. In the first issue of To-Day in 1893 Jerome had written a short piece on ‘A lay in the Links’. In this he drew attention to the rapid rise of golfing and the growth of links that were ‘springing up like magic’ around London. He reckoned that golf would be the game of the future but for an unexpected reason. He averred that its popularity was mainly because any ‘properly constituted man can enjoy himself at it’. However, he added that playing golf alone was more enjoyable for the player who ‘can fudge over every ball [...] and needn’t count the strokes which he misses’.48 Here he denies the competitive spirit and subverts the basis of serious sport. In addition to golf Jerome was adamant that a number of competitive sports were undesirable, even if undertaken at a recreational level. He had pungent comments to make about a number of them with, I suggest, his tongue only partly in his cheek. For example: ●

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Bowls: it is a ‘game you can play without getting hot and excited, and losing your dignity.’49 Croquet: ‘an irritating game’.50 English skating: ‘invented by someone with a wooden leg. [...] there is no joy in it’.51 Golf: ‘a remedy rather than a game’.52 Hunting: ‘Killing has never attracted me’.53 Tandem cycling: ‘asking for trouble, sooner or later’.54 Tennis: ‘the only active game that a man can play when he is old [...]. A rattling good game of tennis I have seen played by four men whose united years totalled two hundred and forty years’.55 Tobogganing: ‘Soon loses its charm’.56

Jerome K. Jerome 63 Perhaps unintentionally Jerome distinguished between what he saw as the perceived dualism of play and sport. ‘The Englishman does not understand play’, he wrote.57 His implied praise for play but his implied distaste for sports was illustrated by his view that devotees who participate seriously sacrifice both mind and body. These observations resonate with the neo-Marxist view of sport as being both banal and conservative. The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, observing the 1936 Olympic Games, stated that the Olympics are reactionary and can be compared with the ‘industrial science of Taylorism that employed the stopwatch to analyse minutely the bodily actions of workers for the purpose of setting norms for worker productivity in mechanised production. This was precisely the distinctive characteristic of the new Olympics’.58 Additionally, through excess, it damages the body and creates a world of sports medicine, a totally new business and occupation born of achievement-orientation. Jerome damns the lack of intellectual tastes of sportspeople (again, precursors of numerous modern sporting celebrities), calling them ‘pitiable objects’ for whom, ‘never having learned to read anything but the sporting papers, books are no use’.59 At the time he was writing (the early twentieth century), national governing bodies for various sports were being established over Europe, mimicking what had been going on in Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century. In much of his writing Jerome hints at the negative aspects of the geographical diffusion of sport. He noted the excess to which sport was taken in England and, recognising that ‘the foreigner’ was ‘taking kindly to our sports’, hoped that they would learn from the bad example of Britain and ‘not overdo the thing’. However, he was forced to admit that this seemed unlikely and he correctly saw sports mania taking over much of the Continent.60 He praised the French for treating golf as merely a game, playing it in a ‘merry fashion, that is shocking to English eyes’. The ‘German [on the other hand] with the thoroughness characteristic of him, is working hard’ in adopting it.61 By 1905 tennis was widely adopted ‘from St Petersburg to Bordeaux’ and, witnessing the rapid growth of the sport in Freiburg, he estimated that there were 100 tennis courts there. He proudly added that ‘a little red-haired girl [he] had taught to play had become German’s lady champion’.62 Sensitivity and social concern Jerome, his rowing companions and his broader circle (plus some of the other authors explored in this book) were contemporaries of Pierre de Coubertin and the Baron’s path may well have crossed that of Jerome’s chum Conan Doyle at the 1908 Olympic Games at London’s White City Stadium.63 However, my reason for referring to rowing is that Coubertin saw it as the ideal modern sport, declaring it ‘the ‘most perfect gymnastic exercise there is’.64 Writing in 1922 he thought that it is the ‘rower’s pleasure to feel himself a thinking machine [...]. Rhythmed like music and happening in the heart of nature between air and water, this deliberately disciplined motion is the most satisfying and fortifying in existence’.65 Such views, which put emphasis on the body as machine disciplined and fortified, were not what Jerome had in mind with his three men on a boat, though he would have

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appreciated the notion of rowing ‘in the heart of nature’ and some of his rhetoric about sailing and rhythm may have resonated with that of the Baron. However, rowing was not Jerome’s favourite sport and he averred that: There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet – except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground: you are part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers. Her glorious arms are around you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are singing to you.66 A caveat here is that Jerome was referring to recreational sailing but as with Sorley’s running, competition and seriousness are not prerequisites for sensuous pleasure and I will return in the next chapter to this theme in the context of John Betjeman’s unlikely participation in surfing. Jerome was clearly capable of invoking the experiential dimensions of sporting participation – the ‘embodied experience’ of movement-culture. All too often performance and result are reduced to cold statistics and rankings and the body is read as an object to be altered, to be improved and raised in rank.67 Even body-cultures that, on the face of it, possess considerable aesthetic qualities and are not objectively quantified – activities like gymnastics and dancing, diving and synchronised swimming – are forced into the corset of quantification. The objectifying of the subjective reduces the athlete to a statistic. Yet even in the most sterile of sporting activities it is possible to read the sensual and aesthetic dimensions. The problem of writing the sensory experiences of sport was noted in the previous chapter and (as Sorley pointed out) such writing might be expected to be more difficult for those who are non-participants. However, for the spectator the visual sense is stimulated and though unwilling to take part, Jerome read ski-jumping with a sensitivity not found in much of his more popular writing. Ski-jumping was one of the skiing events for which he had much admiration. Witnessing it in Switzerland he wrote as follows: The signal is given to go, and the skier gently moves forward, skis straight, side by side, with the knees just bent. The hard, beaten track grows steeper. The pine trees glide past him, swifter and swifter. Suddenly the trees divide: the track heads straight as an arrow to – nothing. And then that glorious leap into sheer space with arms outstretched and head thrown back. I wonder how long it seems to him until the earth comes rushing up to meet him, and he is flying through the cheering crowd towards the flagstaff.68 This sensitive picture reflects Jerome’s ability to catch the ‘potential exhilaration of sport’ and he ‘evokes a fine feeling of excitement’ in what one of his biographers, Joseph Connolly, described as this ‘sensational depiction’.69 And the ‘record’ of the ski-jump was not reported in quantitative terms but in words and

Jerome K. Jerome 65 sentences. This suggests that Jerome was sympathetic to a sporting aesthetic rather than to the mania for a quantified result, as noted in his recognition of the sensuous nature of boating and sailing. It is currently recognised that the representation of physical movement is notoriously difficult. Indeed, some observers feel that ‘there are things that we (humans) can feel, sense and express that are unspeakable, unsayable and unwriteable’, dance, shock and gestures being cited as examples but one could add sailing, running, ski-jumping and surfing.70 Jerome, in his attempt to represent ski-jumping, at least tries to represent what he ‘really’ felt like. Equally interesting, I think, is Jerome’s awareness of the social nature of sport in the context of tennis. At the turn of the nineteenth century tennis was a sport dominated by the upper and middle classes of European society. In Idle Ideas in 1905 he records a trip to Brussels where he visited a suburban ‘tennis ground’. Recording his visit he wrote: It is a pretty sight, generally speaking, a tennis ground abroad. [...] The ground is often charmingly situated, the club-house picturesque; there is always laughter and merriment. The play may not be good to watch but the picture is delightful. [...] The ground was bordered by a wood on one side, and surrounded on the other three by petites fermes – allotments, as we should call them in England, worked by the peasants themselves. It was a glorious spring afternoon. The courts were crowded. The red earth and the green grass formed a background against which the women, in their new Parisian toilets, under their bright parasols, stood out like wondrous bouquets of moving flowers. The whole atmosphere was a delightful mingling of idle gaiety, flirtation, and graceful sensuousness. A modern Watteau would have seized upon it with avidity. Just beyond – separated by the almost invisible wire fencing – a group of peasants were working in the field. An old woman and a young girl, with ropes around their shoulders, were drawing a harrow, guided by a withered old scarecrow of a man. They paused for a moment at the wire fencing, and looked through. It was an odd contrast: the two worlds divided by that wire fencing – so slight, almost invisible. The girl swept the sweat from her face with her hand; the woman pushed back her grey locks underneath her handkerchief knotted around her head; the old man straightened himself with some difficulty. So they stood, for perhaps a minute, gazing with quiet, passionless faces through that slight fencing, that a push from their work-hardened hands might have levelled. Was there any thought, I wonder, passing through their brains?71 Jerome leaves the final question unanswered. The peasants seemed to know their place but like the minds of sportspersons it is impossible to know what is going on inside their heads. Jerome presents a kind of sociology of the tennis court (much more sophisticated than John Betjeman’s treatment of it, as shown in the following chapter). Jerome sees it as problematic. It is a ‘contact zone’ but while two

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social groups meet they do not seem to engage. There is an almost absent spatial division between them but the huge social gulf is obvious. The significance of boundaries in sport is writ large.72 And there is a suggestion of peasant resistance to the privilege of the tennis players through their sly civility and hint that they might destroy the dividing fence. Tennis acted as the context for such a social geography and it seems to me that Jerome saw it as inequitable. Of course, in modern, competitive tennis it would be the ‘player’ who would also be sweeping the sweat from her face but these were earlier days when the division of behaviours was less ambiguous than they are in the modern world of the sports-worker. It may also be of passing interest that Jerome alludes to grace, sensuousness and flirtation, themes I return to in the next chapter. Mocking the ideal athlete Sporting skill and sporting achievement have a tendency to create, in the minds of many, the ideal person or the sports hero(ine). How often are those who succeed at sports seen as the ideal students, the most liked by their peers? Research from the United States in the 1950s revealed that successful high school athletes were regarded more favourably among the student body than those who were most academically able. The sociologist Abraham Tannenbaum explored evaluations by high-school boys of ‘stereotyped, fictitious students’. The boys were asked to ascribe traits to each of eight fictitious characters. A ‘mean acceptability rating’ fell into an order of acceptability, ranked from high to low. All athletes had higher acceptability than any non-athlete, even a ‘brilliant nonstudious athlete’. Additionally, boys in the first two years of high school attributed great value to athletic achievement and would prefer to be remembered as an athletic star than as a brilliant student.73 Young people therefore tend to yearn to be an ideal sportsperson and continue to ‘worship’ sports heroes today. The worshiping of sports heroes is the subject of one of Jerome’s many essays. In ‘On the nobility of ourselves’ he implicitly critiqued the notion of the ideal athlete and the tendency to idealise him or her.74 He asks whether we would be happier if we were to idealise (and idolise) one another less. This is because the ideal (athlete) is a work of fiction or a myth, a subject I will return to in Chapter 7. Jerome ironically illustrates his ideal by taking the example of ‘a good, all-round sportswoman’, otherwise known as ‘a terrible dragon of virtue’.75 Her qualities were manifold. She ‘leaps the six-barred gate with a yard and a half to spare’; she ‘floats gracefully off Dieppe on stormy mornings’; she ‘dives, and never a curl of her hair is disarranged’; she ‘stands lightly on tip-toe and volleys a tennis ball six feet above her head’; she ‘keeps the head of the punt straight against a stiff current and a strong wind’; and she ‘skates in high-heeled French shoes at an angle of forty-five to the surface of the ice, both hands in her muff’.76 In addition she ‘drives a tandem [...] at eighteen miles an hour’ and ‘plays croquet with one hand, and looks as if she has enjoyed the game’ and ‘never tries to accidentally kick the ball into position when nobody is noticing’.77 Jerome also mocked the fictional sports hero. In an essay on ‘Why I hate heroes’ he feels sick about how well the hero did everything.

Jerome K. Jerome 67 For example, ‘he condescends to play cricket! He never scores less than a hundred – does not know how to score less than a hundred’.78 Jerome’s first reason for hating sports heroes is that it always seems to be their day! The second reason that they are so obnoxiously effortless. For example, he would never patronise a swimming bath nor pay ninepence for a machine. Instead he ‘goes out at uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes. Some of us, when we try to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water’. Likewise, he does not have to get up early and worry about dumb-bells in his nightshirt; he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him. If his horse declines to jump a hedge, he slips down off the animal’s back and throws the poor thing over; it saves argument. [...] Then when he reluctantly challenges the crack fencer of Europe to a duel, our instinct is to call out and warn his opponent.79 Elsewhere, in his essay ‘The hobby rider’, he finds another reason for disliking sportspeople, that is the fanaticism with which they embrace both their sport and their hero – in other words, the sports bore. Jerome recalls the hero worship of a tennis player with whom he was holidaying in the Alps. His friend was a tennis fan and [w]hen he was not playing tennis, or practising tennis, or reading about tennis, he was talking about tennis. Renshaw was the prominent figure in the tennis world at that time, and he mentioned Renshaw until there grew up within my soul a dark desire to kill Renshaw in a quiet, unostentatious way, and bury him. One drenching afternoon he talked tennis to me for three hours on end, referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand nine hundred and thirteen times.80 Jerome is mocking the sporting heroine and hero and the infantile sports fan. It is illuminating that he included a female as one of his examples, given their considerable under-representation in sport at the time. But it may be the case that, traditionally at least, female sports stars were rarely represented in anything but flattering poses. Jerome’s sports heroine makes the rest of us dissatisfied with ourselves. But his message is that there is good in everyone and that nobody is perfect. It is a message missed today in the hero worship of shallow stars and sporting celebrities. The noble athlete and a sporting dystopia Although Jerome clearly displayed an interest in, and a concern for, fin de siècle society and the place of sport within it, he was certainly no socialist, even less so a communist. Nevertheless, the implications of such political ideologies for the realm of modern sport are both implicit and explicit in an amusing essay titled

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‘The New Utopia’, contained in The Diary of a Pilgrimage.81 The story centres on Jerome spending an evening at the ‘National Socialist Club’, smoking cigars and raising his glass to ‘equality’. Upon retiring to his bed he dreamt that he had slept for a 1,000 years until being awakened in the twenty-ninth century. In 2899 he found a ‘new utopia’, a perfect world of equality. In the city things were ‘very clean and very quiet. The streets, which were designated by numbers, ran out from each other at right angles, and all presented exactly the same appearance’.82 The people ‘wore a quiet, grave expression’ and all looked the same, all dressed in grey with each man being clean-shaven with black hair cut the same length. These were the regulations for men and women in a system where all were equal, women being almost indistinguishable from men. Here was an attempt to ‘obviate, to a certain extent, the errors of Nature’.83 Charles Dodgson, who opposed the planned conversion of the University Parks to a cricket field, was an admirer of ‘errors of nature’ as they were inimical to the modernism of serious cricket but, as I have stressed and will return to later, in many modern sports it is important to eliminate nature as far as possible. In Russia Jerome was a popular figure and his works were relatively well known there. However, his ‘Utopia’ essay was banned at the first attempt to publish it in 1898 (under the Russian title of ‘Future Socialism’) despite the fact that his writing was generally thought to be humorous and harmless.84 Having said this, it has been suggested that ‘The New Utopia’ could have been a source for Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, published in 1924.85 It also seems to foreshadow both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and is suggestive of some of the dystopian dimensions of the modern world of sports. In the ‘New Utopia’ people did not have names but numbers; they became ‘statistical persons’ in the manner of the schoolchildren in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: recall how Thomas Gradgrind calls Sissy Jupp ‘Girl number twenty.’86 And in Zamyatin’s We, the population is numbered rather than named. In Jerome’s Utopia names had been eliminated because they possessed too much inequality, certain names carrying different connotations than others. Government-appointed officials looked after some aspects of hygiene at appointed times of the day. This would eliminate distinctions between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. This form of health education was carried out in ‘huge, barrack like buildings, all the same size and shape. Among them were those labelled “Bath” and “Gymnasium”. The blocks of buildings accommodated 1,000 people each living “together in fraternity and equality”’.87 Likewise, in Zamyatin’s dystopia the numbered members of OneState ‘at one and the same time [...] leave for a stroll and go to the auditorium, to the hall for the Taylor exercise, and then to bed’.88 Likewise, Jerome and Zamyatin include bells and clocks that determined when residents would rise, be washed, and do their three hours of work each day. The family had been abolished because of the inequality that would be found among husbands, wives and children. Where was the equality when one family might have ‘two sweet-tempered children’ when another had ‘eleven noisy, illdispositioned brats?’.89 No marriage meant no domestic troubles and children were ‘carefully bred [...] and brought up in public nurseries and schools until they

Jerome K. Jerome 69 [were] fourteen’.90 Shops had been abolished because the state fed, clothed, housed, doctored, washed, dressed and buried its populace. Jerome woke up. He found men and women suffering, loving, struggling, helping one another, stealing from one another – in other words, living.91 He recognised that his dream was far from being utopian and instead was more of a nightmare. There are clearly some sporting implications that could be teased out of the preceding description and these become more explicit as Jerome encounters some other dimensions of the ironically named ‘New Utopia’. The works of Shakespeare, Scott and Thackeray (high culture) had been burned; they were works that presented people as ‘slaves and beasts of burden’.92 In the ‘New Utopia’ children would have ‘operations on their brains or limbs to bring them closer to the average’. But what about those inhabitants who were cleverer, were taller, or could run faster, throw further and jump higher? The predictable response was that no sports or games were permitted since they ‘caused competition, and competition led to inequality’.93 The guide who was taking our dreamer through the city said that he sometimes thought ‘that is was a pity that we could not level up some times, instead of always levelling down; but, of course, that is impossible’.94 A number of other qualities of modern body-cultural practices are exemplified in Jerome’s dream. For example, indoor swimming baths and gymnasiums, relatively limited in number at the end of the nineteenth century, are now widespread. The interiorisation of sport is continuing at a rapid pace and domed stadiums and urban ‘fitness centres’ have replaced rivers, lakes, meadows and forests as sites for sport and fitness. This is often part of the state’s physical welfare and physical education provision that is today institutionalised as part of state-directed national curricula. The state control of sport was well typified in much of Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s and substantial state subsidies are now supplied to aspiring athletes in many countries. Additionally, the natural environment continues to be found wanting when it comes to the creating of the optimal sports milieu. The emergence of ‘turf science’, synthetic surfaces and indoor arenas seeks to exclude nature in the same spirit as that described in the ‘New Utopia’. The abolition of – or at least, a de-emphasis on – competitive sports has been attempted in some states. The body as component part of the gymnastic product(ion) illustrated the levelling down of the individual and can be seen in certain kinds of team gymnastics from the late nineteenth century. From the 1920s Eastern bloc nations adopted forms of mass gymnastic displays. This phenomenon came very close to Jerome’s prediction. Participants in these mass events were denied individuality and instead ‘had the capacity to express the positive feeling of community and social solidarity’.95 The mass displays of gymnasts, often featuring over 10,000 participants in identical uniforms, nearperfectly choreographed in abstract patterns in huge stadiums, were non-competitive and sought to be ‘free of any regional barriers and class characteristic, [making it] so suitable for bridging class and regional barriers and

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therefore modelling the imagined community’.96 Such mass gymnastics with their abstract orderliness return us to Charles Dodgson’s checkerboard landscape. The Czech Sokal and the Nazi equivalent suggest a zeitgeist of de-individualised mass ornamentation (Figure 4.1), enclosed and subject to surveillance that has been metaphorically likened to a prison. Petr Roubal notes that Instead of prison walls isolating one inmate from another, there was on the field of the stadium an invisible geometrical grid, which determined the position of each and every gymnast. A gymnast standing on his mark in the stadium was no longer part of the masses, but became an analytical unit, an intersection of axes x and y, which could be directed, controlled and analysed from any point in the stadium. The introduction of the grid was probably the most important innovation of gymnastic performance under communism.97 The gymnasts performed the same movements at exactly the same time at exactly the same speed. Their performances were perfectly executed, organised and scientifically analysed. This seems to come close to Jerome’s prediction of people as numbers except that in this case they were merely x/y coordinates. The ‘numbering’ of people as a basis for surveillance is central to the world of modernity, though admittedly not to the extreme extent described by Jerome. Sport is a world of statistics where individuals are ranked, recorded, averaged and subjected to statistical analysis. But whereas in the ‘New Utopia’ children were ‘dumbed down’ to an

Figure 4.1 Manipulation of individual human beings for the sake of propagation of a political idea: Prague Spartakiad 1986. (Photograph courtesy of Zdenûk Lhoták)

Jerome K. Jerome 71 average, in the German Democratic Republic (and in other East European nations), ‘children, in particular, became experimental subjects for the high performance theorists’.98 Despite the Sokal-type body-culture, competitive sport was never eliminated, and, somewhat curiously, by the 1960s the Eastern bloc became obsessed with record breaking and victory. More akin to Jerome’s dreamy dystopian predictions, China de-emphasised competitive sport under Chairman Mao and, for religious reasons, some countries still place restrictions on sporting competitions, notably where fundamentalist versions of Islam are practised. Additionally, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the de-emphasis of serious competitive sports in the West as a result of ‘new age’ or ‘hippy’ movements. Jerome’s gloomy prognostications are not entirely without some substance. His distaste for the standardisation, the soulless environment and the overwhelming dominance of the state in life in general can easily be read as being typical of the way top-level competitive sport was moving in the twentieth century. Questions of amateurism and ‘fair play’ The pages of To-Day provide the student of sports with a number of insights about sport in the late nineteenth century. A crucial characteristic of much of Jerome’s writing and editing in his weekly magazine was his concern with the corruption of sport and the contravention of the ethos of amateurism. This problem had appeared in the cycling world in the problems surrounding the proposed race between Shorland and his French opponents. It also appeared in the context of Association Football (soccer). In England professionalism in soccer was ‘legalised’ in 1885 and by 1900 it was widespread. Jerome claimed that he ‘loved football as a game’99 but he failed to recognise the semantic problem of distinguishing between ‘play’, ‘game’ and ‘sport’. Nor was there much transparency in his statement that ‘football is a grand game [but] it is played not for sport but for money’.100 But sport was played for money and what Jerome wanted was a particular form of football that was playful rather than serious. As he saw it, football placed too much emphasis on commerce, competition and corruption brought about by the practice of professionalism. He saw soccer in 1895 as little less than a cattle market where human beings were bought and sold, observing that there was only one Bury man in the Bury team of 1896.101 But the migration of footballers was exhibiting a different scale of migration as an ironic cartoon in To-Day revealed (Figure 4.2). A market for footballers had emerged in which fluidity of representation existed so that players became able to represent one nation after another. Presciently, he recognised that players could change nations at will. The cartoon elicited considerable interest from the football world, which was said to be ‘greatly wounded’ by Jerome’s intervention. He responded by stating that ‘It is much what we wanted to do’ and followed with an attack on the commodification of the sport and its players:

Figure 4.2 Football in 1895: ‘Now then, gents, who says another ten bob a week for the finest football player in the three countries, and a safe draw, gents? Has played for England against Scotland, has played for Scotland against England. Just the man for a Welsh or Irish International team – won’t a Welsh or Irish secretary make a bid? He goes to the highest bidder, gents, so look sharp and show your love of sport!’ (To-Day)

Jerome K. Jerome 73 Its object is not the goal but the gate. The spectators view it simply as a gladiatorial contest, and a football match in the North of England stands on a very little higher plane of civilisation than does a Spanish bull-fight. The game is too often played by a mob of rowdies and petty gamblers rather than men with any love of the sport.102 It is a coincidence that Jerome was writing in To-Day just as Pierre de Coubertin was preparing the first celebration of the modern Olympics. The two would have agreed about the role of players and spectators. Players, thought de Coubertin, should display the old tradition of chivalry while the spectators, who should be resting sportsmen, should see athletic performance as a form of education.103 Likewise he disapproved of professionalism and sought to ‘defend oneself against the spirit of lucre and professionalism which threatens to invade’ the amateurs.104 Furthermore, hooliganism was far from being a twentieth-century phenomenon and Jerome documented a number of incidents in the mid 1890s that would be recognisable to students of hooliganism a century later. ‘Since the wide introduction of professionalism into football’, Jerome wrote, ‘an enormous number of blackguards and bullies have been swept into the game. [...] When you turn sport into a business [...] you drive away the true sporting element and invite rowdyism.’ Football was ‘neither a sport or a pastime’: it was a disease, trumpeted To-Day.105 Referee-baiting was rife among the dreaded ‘Northern supporters’ and sticks and stones ‘were freely used’ as missiles at a match between Brighouse Rangers and Hunslet. However, the men that made up the hooligans were little worse than the players and those who ran the clubs. Jerome alluded to a number of players who were involved in vicious domestic and other assaults, further evidence that the professional came from a ‘low and savage class. A true sportsman is bound to be a gentleman at heart, no matter to what class he may belong.’ Yet a Blackburn Rovers wife-beater was one of the popular heroes that ‘football crowds pay their shillings to gape at’106 and news of an attempt to murder a football referee in Wakefield in 1896 led Jerome to report that it was ‘another example of the deterioration brought to football by professionalism’.107 He (mistakenly) predicted that soccer was ‘on the direct road to extinction because of the employment of such men’.108 A prophetic reader of the Sun mischievously suggested that amateurism should be abolished, a view that did not enter the world of sports until after the Second World War. However, the conservative Jerome felt that his argument proved ‘what a state of degradation the game must have fallen, when it can be patronised by such a thinker’.109 Jerome penned his general view of declining standards as follows: Sport was the one thing to draw us together. On the cricket and football fields the squire and the peasant, merchant and mechanic met as brethren and fellow sportsmen. Professionalism has changed all this [...]. Sport has become a business, and looks like becoming a very low and dirty business. Comradeship is disappearing; all that is being left now is the spectator and performer.110

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More whimsically he added that professionalism, having ‘killed off’ football, would spread so that no ‘country-house party’ would be complete without two professional billiard players ‘engaged for the season’ to entertain guests.111 Likewise, and somewhat more presciently, he predicted that the University boat race ‘will be rowed by sixteen professionals, collected from all quarters of the world’.112 Jerome clearly opposed trends in sport rather than sport as an institution. As well as opposing professionalism and its manifestations, and crude crowd behaviour, Jerome also opposed the growing number of women footballers in England. Here, in Coubertinian mode, he argued that the lady footballers are starring in the provinces [but] they do not improve in their play, and really ought to give the thing up [...] football is essentially a game of strength, and it is not nice to see the female form [...] being charged over the turf.113 This attitude acts as a reminder that opposition to certain aspects of sports is not necessarily progressive. Jerome was also aware of a ‘professional’ approach, even if money was not immediately involved. The excesses that sport encourages were recognised as being dubious if not unfair. He drew attention to the death of the Welsh cyclist Arthur Linton, brought on by over-exertion and typhoid fever. It was also suggested that Linton had dosed himself with arsenic and so injured the lining of his stomach: ‘It is always a mistake to carry athletic prowess to such a pitch that drugs are required to assist in a man’s performance.’114 He was not against ‘judicious competitive cycling, but against an excess of what, in moderation, is a healthful sport’. To all sports he might have applied the view that ‘excess in racing is debilitating, if not always fatal’.115 Likewise, Jerome opposed the widespread practice of ‘pacemaking’, a technique common in cycling and running. The pacemakers were described as ‘the bloodsuckers of the track’.116 And ‘what use, I should like to ask, do records serve nowadays?”. Most observers of the cycling world knew that ‘time tests’ were ‘accomplished under quite artificial conditions’. Teams of cyclists and groups of motor cars travelled in front of star cyclists reducing the effect of ‘windage’.117 By the late 1890s he wrongly predicted that employment of paid pacemakers in track cycling was threatened and that the decline of track cycling races, starting in 1897, indicated that the public had wearied of cycle racing. The winners had become predictable and he admitted that ‘cycle racing had become deadly dull’.118 Like Sorley, Jerome’s magazine contrasted the racer (or ‘scorcher’) unfavourably with the cyclist who takes pleasure in cycling along country roads at a moderate rate. The amateur, he reckoned, was suffering from ‘the selfishness of the professional speed merchants’, who were record breakers rather than sportsmen. He called them ‘commercial travellers of the lowest kind’: unable to ‘earn their bread from their brains, they resort to their legs as a means of livelihood’.119 To Jerome then, record seekers fell into the same negative category as professionals and drug takers.

Jerome K. Jerome 75 Jerome’s pessimistic view of professionalism reflected the view of the cultural historian Johann Huizinga, half a century later. His seminal work Homo Ludens lauds the place of play in human life and strongly notes that with the ‘increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure-play is inevitably lost’. He continues, ‘The spirit of the professional is no longer the true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontaneity and carelessness and sport has become profane, “unholy” in every way and has no organic connection whatever with the structure of society’. While it might be of importance to spectators Huizinga felt that sport ‘remains sterile’.120 Associated with the distaste for professionalism, pacemaking and the dumbing down of spectatorship, Jerome also attacked the growth of gambling. This practice he found acceptable in upper-crust betting clubs but felt that ‘ready money’ betting among the masses was becoming a problem. He wrote that the betting spirit grows, and true sport is disappearing from among us or degenerating into a mere vehicle for gambling. This state of affairs is unhealthy. Your average man is beginning to take no interest in anything but the racecourse, the cricket and the football field.121 This is perhaps as strong an admonition of sport as Jerome recorded. His allusion to the ‘average’ man has a somewhat elitist ring to it and his additional comment that a ‘healthy-minded young man’ in the late 1890s was one who read ‘no other paper than the Sporting Times, who cares nothing for politics and art, who thinks only of sport’ is an equally damning indictment of the ‘bread and circus’ function that sport served.122 For Jerome, money was the root of all evil but he gave the impression that this was a somewhat recent ‘problem’, brought about by the gentlemen who legislated the professionalisation of sport. At the same time, however, Jerome seemed to be vaguely aware of the ‘economic’ problem of ‘the amateur’. To be sure, he was fully aware of ‘shamaturism’, especially in the world of cycling, the sport about which he seemed to be most informed and which covered more columns in To-Day than any other. It was no great secret that before the days of the alleged professional/amateur divide, many amateurs were subsidised. ‘The makers of the machines they steered to victory’, he wrote, ‘paid in cash for the advertisement they received. Frequently, tyre and chain manufacturers did likewise.’123 However, even if no money changed hands, athletes who become successful inevitably accumulate esteem, or, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it, symbolic capital that, following a successful career, can be converted into economic capital, i.e. cash. It took several decades for this type of thinking to permeate writing on sport but by the 1920s athletics commentators displayed considerable scepticism about the amateur/professional binary.124

Concluding comments In his concern with the state of football, Jerome yearned for ‘the good old times of football when village played village, and town played town, for the love of the

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game and the glory and honour of victory’,125 or, as D. J. Taylor put it, ‘Nostalgia for a lost prelapsarian [sporting] paradise’.126 This kind of writing was typical of Jerome’s oeuvre, much of which displayed a nostalgic yearning for what he saw as the gentler times of yesteryear. He saw the world, part of which was the rapidly growing world of sport, changing from the relatively unorganised to the increasingly bureaucratised and commercial. He found examples readily to hand. Whereas de Coubertin had rated the Henley Regatta one of the most impressive and organised sporting events in Europe,127 Jerome noted that it had been spoiled by none other than King Edward VII who transformed it from ‘a simple, quiet affair to a society function’ at which little interest was shown in the racing.128 Jerome also bemoaned the loss of country lanes, formerly bordered by grass verges on which horses could gallop. Additionally, commons for hunting and racing had been transformed into the dreaded golf courses, maligned by Orwell who wrote of ‘the inherently snobbish game’ of golf ‘which causes whole stretches of countryside to be turned into carefully guarded class preserves’.129 And as a pseudo idler, the slower pace of life attracted him in a world that had been rapidly speeding up for several decades. Jerome didn’t use the word ‘Corinthian’ but it was the kind of ethos displayed by the Corinthian Casuals football team that he craved.130 Jerome and de Coubertin were contemporaries. Yet Jerome, a rabid reader of the British press, made no mention of the 1896 Olympics nor subsequent Olympic Games, as far as I am aware, in any of his written work.131 He was more interested in what would happen to Olympia in London and the dress codes of attendees at Henley. Yet there is evidence that he did reflect about sport, the direction in which it was going and even what participants may have been thinking. To judge from his written work, Jerome K. Jerome appears ambivalent about sport. In To-Day he certainly felt that by the end of the nineteenth century achievement sport was falling into a downward spiral, perverted by professionalism, drugs, violence and excess. Yet the paradox (which de Coubertin had recognised) was that modern sport was and is the very body-cultural activity that is driven by excess, and indeed sanctions it. After all, what is ‘faster, higher, stronger’ but the green light for sporting overindulgence?

5

John Betjeman

‘How many times must I explain The way a boy should hold a gun?’ I recalled my father’s pain At such a milksop for a son. John Betjeman1

The ‘much loved’ twentieth-century poet John Betjeman (1906–1984) was a product of Marlborough College and the University of Oxford. In each of these august institutions of learning he was exposed to the sports boom that, by the 1920s, was well into its stride. However, Betjeman was a self-confessed idler, in both sports and studies. Far from being a healthy athlete Betjeman, in one of his poems, called himself ‘an unhealthy worm’.2 He was described as possessing a sense of ‘physical inferiority’.3 At school, as autumn terms approached there stretched before him ‘weeks and weeks of games of football in cold fields, and no hot water left when you return to the changing room, and at these games you must appear keen for the honour of the house’.4 He could not box and ‘greatly dreaded pain’5 – a sensory experience found in almost all serious sports and a widespread reason for disliking them. Sports are cultural events in which pain is a central feature, almost an essence of the kinds of sports (boxing and rugby in particular) that Betjeman would have encountered but (often successfully) tried to avoid at school. At Oxford, sports were still as important as, if not more important than, they had been in Dodgson’s day, but for Betjeman games ‘were neither here nor there’.6 Yet as I shall show, several sports feature in many of the poems in his prolific output. His negative attitudes to them are both implicit and explicit in his broader corpus of writing. John Betjeman was born in Highgate, near Parliament Hill Fields in north London. He was the only child of a prosperous businessman who made furnishings and other domestic wares for expensive retailers such as Asprey’s and Harrods.7 As a boy John Betjeman loved walking and cycling through the streets of London and travelling on the Underground. He had a preoccupation with the architecture of churches and carefully observed the variety of architectural styles,

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from Gothic cathedrals to mock-Tudor suburbia. Educated first at Highgate Junior School he proceeded at the age of nine to become a boarder at the posh Dragon School in north Oxford. Here, more than one teacher noted that he was ‘little, if at all, interested in games of any sort’.8 He was to become familiar, however, with the city of Oxford and developed his cycling skills when visiting local churches on his architectural observations.

Recreationist/anti-sportist Twenty years or more after Charles Sorley, at the age of fourteen, Betjeman was sent to study at Marlborough where he was exposed to the games ethic and a schoolboy hierarchy that was still mainly based on skill and achievement at sports: ‘Great were the ranks and privileges there: / Four captains ruled, selected for their brawn / And skill at games; and how we reverenced them!’9 Betjeman was never going to be a ‘blood’. Like Sorley, he disliked many aspects of the school and was scared of the kinds of sports practised there. He feared the regimentation of both school and sport and recalled ‘The dread of beatings! Dread of being late! / And greatest dread of all, the dread of games!’10 His most thorough biographer, Bevis Hillier, writes that ‘John was uninterested in rugby or cricket’; and he did not find exhilarating ‘the gruelling runs over the downs with a time limit out and back and a caning if you were late either way’.11 He was an accomplished skiver and found a way of ‘Escaping cricket by the skilful ruse / Of biking off to sketch with Mr Hughes’ (the art master).12 And in his later life he admitted to being ‘no good at cricket or football, bicycling, or tricycling, badminton or polo’.13 He had (literally) a ‘train-spotting’ mentality and rather than peruse Wisden he preferred to study assiduously works like Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.14 These days he would probably be called a ‘nerd’. At Marlborough John Betjeman demonstrated that he was not simply uninterested in organised sports but that he actively opposed them. He became involved in a sort of underground school magazine (contra the conventional Marlburian) called The Heretick whose leitmotif was the disapproval of such things as the ‘Officers’ Training Corps’, ‘pedantic masters’ and ‘all forms of organized sport’. Betjeman’s suggestion for the magazine’s cover illuminated the oppressive nature of sport with ‘an athlete trampling on an aesthete in a welter of footballs’.15 However, the editors rejected his design but maintained a critical image on a cover showing pipe-playing fauns taunting a scowling ‘tough’ who was armed with a hockey stick and gazed longingly toward a pair of rugby posts16 (Figure 5.1). The athletic set threatened to physically attack the editors but such intimidation came to nothing. Even so, The Heretick was short-lived and was forcibly discontinued after the second issue as a result of parental protests. Betjeman was widely regarded as a ‘character’. He was jovial and a good actor. He also held anti-establishment views. His dislike of vigorous physical activity led him to feign injury or illness in order to avoid the loathsome and compulsory team sports. He managed to get on with athletes by ‘turning himself into a joke

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Figure 5.1 The Heretick (reproduced by kind permission of Marlborough College)

figure whom they would laugh at rather than persecute’.17 He was the sort of young man whose father might have said: The boy doesn’t look up to much. [...] I can’t think why he doesn’t take more exercise instead of mooning about round churches all day. [... ] When I was his age I was [...] going out with other fellows to play cricket or sail model yachts.18 Unfortunately for young Betjeman his father was an all-round sportsman. He played golf at his club at Barnet but was also ‘a cricketer, a footballer, an enthusiastic fisherman and a good shot – the epitome of mens sana in corpore sano’19 and the exact opposite of his rebellious offspring. Indeed, Ernest Betjeman was seen as a tyrant, forcing his son ‘to shoot with his Hertfordshire friends and to play golf in Cornwall’.20

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John Betjeman arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925. According to his friend and later Dean of Wadham College Sir Maurice Bowra, he loved the city of dreaming spires and was carried away by it, intoxicated by the social life.21 He unrealistically aspired to become a don and to ‘read English literature to the accompaniment of lovely surroundings’.22 But his interests hardly fitted the university’s curriculum. John Betjeman’s attitude to serious sport was summarised many years later as follows: ‘Of course, I was an aesthete and never played any game for my college and never discovered, nor have yet discovered, where the playing fields of my college were’.23 Betjeman resolutely disliked the sporting set and the claque that assembled regularly in Vincent’s, a posh dining and drinking club for elite sportsmen where stories of famous feats were exchanged and whose membership was by invitation only. He also stressed the considerable social distances between athletes and aesthetes: ‘The really grand athletes sit about in Vincent’s, are looked up to by the dons, and may be acquainted with some of the rich men. To the literary and political world, they are unknown.’24 Magdalen’s President, who seems to have admitted Betjeman on the basis of his poetry, was Herbert Warren who felt that Classics should be tempered by athletics.25 His college was full of ‘hearties’ who were inclined to throw aesthetes into ponds and Betjeman had to revert to his schoolboy tactic of playing the fool in order to avoid verbal or even possible physical conflict.26 In passing, it might be added that the distinction between aesthetes and hearties was ‘loathed’ by another, earlier, Oxonian, Oscar Wilde’s friend, Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Boisie’), who was an accomplished athlete, narrowly missing a blue in the three miles.27 Wilde, like Betjeman, hated all organised sports. Even if the gulf between the two groups was ‘artificial’ (as Douglas put it), it was real enough to Betjeman and his fellow artistic types. Betjeman, physical education and recreation John Betjeman’s dislike of serious sports in no way implies that he never took part in physical recreation. He enjoyed golf (which he pronounced ‘goff’) and swimming but not in the form of organised competitions. Additionally, he continued his regular cycling but, like Dodgson, it is difficult to see him competing in races either in the pool or on the road. A somewhat bizarre engagement with sport occurred in his immediate post-Oxford years. In 1928, having consistently failed to pass a required examination in Divinity, Betjeman was rusticated and spent a term at Thorpe House preparatory school at Gerrard’s Cross in Buckinghamshire. There, he was expected to help with the coaching of cricket, a game about which he knew precious little. He hated the experience and returned for a brief trial period to Oxford. However, he was sent down from the university without gaining a degree (which was not uncommon at the time; Evelyn Waugh suffered the same embarrassment), not even a pass degree that, according to A. N. Wilson, was ‘really designed for the rowing blues and rugby hearties’.28 The question now was what to do with himself. Again, school teaching (always a handy occupational bolt-hole) was an obvious way out and having first failed

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with several applications he ended up at Heddon Court Preparatory School at Cockfosters, near the northern terminus of the Piccadilly Line. Again he had to pretend to know something about cricket. By consulting a copy of Lett’s Schoolboys’ Diary he managed to ‘mug up the names of places on the field’ but, at the same time, made it pretty obvious that he had hardly ever held a cricket bat in his life.29 His interview for the Heddon Court job is recalled in ‘Cricket master’: ‘The sort of man we want must be prepared To take our first eleven. Many boys From last year’s are with us. You will find Their bowling’s pretty good and they are keen.’ ‘And so am I, Sir, very keen indeed.’ Oh where’s mid-on? And what is silly-point? Do six balls make an over? Help me, God!30 Nevertheless, he bluffed his way in. Heddon Court had Baden-Powellism and the sports ethic stamped on it by the former headmaster Henry Frampton Stallard, who retired two years before Betjeman’s arrival. Sportsmanship pervaded the school but Betjeman sought to subvert such an ethos by starting a programme for the conversion of athletes to aesthetes. One of his pupils observed that he ‘cut at the foundations of the establishment’s regard for games [and] [...] our success at games simply plummeted’.31 Here was resistance to sport at the chalk face and some of the school’s best sportsmen were converted to writing poetry, among them ‘the most athletic boys who were really cricket and rugger maniacs’.32 It was at Heddon Court that Betjeman met Margie Geddes, a twenty-year-old with whom he would have an intimate relationship for several decades.33 The site of their first meeting was at a cricket match at the school. His association with her did not curb his fool-like qualities that were illustrated one evening following a modest bout of drinking and a trip to a greyhound-racing track at Haringey. Betjeman and two allies from the school – the flirtatious gym mistress Vera Spencer-Clarke (later Moule) and another teacher named Huxtable – drove an old Morris car three times across the school cricket pitch (‘more holy than the chapel’) that had been meticulously prepared for a game (school versus parents) the following day.34 Whether this was a subconscious anti-sport statement or simply a juvenile jape is not known. Either way it was the transgression of a ‘sacred space’, a theme I will return to later. Huxtable, the driver of the car, was dismissed. On another occasion Betjeman took a lunch break from teaching football (another game with which he was almost certainly unfamiliar) to a bottom form and instead went to a pub in Barnet with two former Oxford chums. There he consumed a large amount of the local Fremlin’s beer and was so drunk that when he returned to school he was unable to take his soccer class. The boys magnanimously took him to his room and never said anything about it.35 Yet despite these pranks he remained at the school for over a year, gaining the benefit of the doubt from the somewhat zany new headmaster John Humphrey ‘Huffy’

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Hope, a Communist who had taught at Eton and who found in Betjeman something of a kindred spirit.36 Hope found sport objectionable, claiming that he had never attended an Eton–Harrow cricket match because of the possibility of him meeting people he disliked. By contrast, his junior partner in the school, Walter Summers, ‘enjoyed bloody boxing matches between the boys’.37 Betjeman’s body-cultural skills Despite his aversion to sport, Betjeman could put his body-cultural skills (such as they were) to good use. One of his more heroic efforts revealed his ability at swimming. While at Heddon Court a boy’s leg got caught in the duckboards that were placed on the bottom of the swimming pool. Betjeman, crowbar in hand, dived in and released the boy’s foot. He left the pool to resounding cheers.38 He was also prepared to take a daily swim in very cold water in the North Sea while on holiday at Jedburgh in southern Scotland, despite turning a greyish-blue colour.39 In addition to swimming he was attracted to surfboarding, using a technique of laying face-downward on the board, a style generally associated with beginners or duffers. It was not a body-cultural practice that one might at first associate with him but in the 1940s he often surfed daily with his family on Polzeath Beach in Cornwall.40 In a BBC broadcast in 1950 he described the surf at Polzeath Bay in his beloved Cornwall as being a ‘watery field of tumbling waves’.41 On one occasion a particularly strong wave took him up to the beach: ‘He stood up triumphantly only to discover that his trunks had been pulled off by the surf.’42 On another occasion, after a number of failed attempts at surfing, he sensed that ‘there is a roar of surf behind me and I am shot forward on this board all along the crest of the wave. Forward, forward gliding fast. I seem to have become the racing wave.’43 Studies of surfing reveal that surfers often express ‘a sense of feeling the energy of the wave passing through them’ and that ‘during the ride there is very little conscious awareness of the board, which takes on the form of a kind of hybrid extension of the body’.44 Betjeman implied this experiential dimension of body and water well before surfing was being studied seriously academically. He appears here to have experienced the merging of the person and the experience – a fusion of dichotomies.45 But ultimately, he didn’t really seem to like it, saying that ‘after half an hour of surfing, I am ready to enjoy anything’.46 The tennis court, as I will show, was a significant attraction for Betjeman and he did play the occasional game. On holiday with Margie Geddes, they were said to be ‘enthusiastic tennis opponents’ but he nevertheless played the fool by competing in carpet slippers and ‘played abominably’. Geddes recorded that he ‘would gain sneaky points [...] by picking up the ball and serving it over the net while he was walking back to the serving line and we weren’t even looking – actually nor was he’.47 Another of his opponents (his doctor while living at Farnborough) recorded that he ‘wasn’t too bad at tennis’. I take that to mean that he wasn’t absolutely hopeless but certainly not very good at it. As usual he was ‘slightly playing the fool’, insisting that he took part dressed in a red Turkish

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fez with tassel attached.48 Such infantilism can be read as subverting the norms of serious sport. His cricketing and tennis tomfoolery, his swimming efforts, his cycling abilities and his attempts at surfing reveal that John Betjeman was far from disengaged from body-cultural practices during the first 30 or more years of his life. It should now be clear, however, that his main reaction to serious sports was to avoid them. And even any physical educational gains that might have come from his swimming and cycling were arguably neutralised by his penchant for having the regular glass of wine or several pints of beer, plus ‘a fag in his mouth and more feeling for motor cars than long hikes’.49

Sportspeople Following his years at Oxford and his forays into school teaching Betjeman became well known for his pronouncements on architecture and town planning, his television programmes and his considerable output of poetry that, it is recognised, ranged widely in quality. His popular verses include frequent allusions to sports and to sportspersons. Such references suggest a willingness to enjoy playful practices and leisurely recreational pursuits but, at the same time, to have a continuing dislike of serious, achievement-oriented and ‘rough’ sports. There is more than a hint that Betjeman read serious sport in an ideological – even a sort of quasi-Marxist – way, seeing it as an opiate of the masses, a new kind of bread and circuses, one of a number of social controls of mass culture that duped the bulk of the population. In the preface to his collection of essays First and Last Loves, he observed that given the existence of state-employed experts and the welfare state a condition of popular docility would be created in which we would ‘never bother to think or see again. We can eat our Weetabix, catch the 8.48, read the sports column and die.’50 These were ironic observations and it is impossible to see Betjeman as a socialist of any hue. John Betjeman generally disliked sportsmen. Almost any male identified with sport signified low cultural tastes and plebeian values. Such views cut across social classes and included Oxford ‘toughs’ as well as the lumpen masses. His book An Oxford University Chest included a not especially complimentary cartoon of games players, drawn by his university pal Osbert Lancaster (Figure 5.2).51 In his poetic attack on ‘Slough’, a town that he sensed displayed the worst ravages of modernity, he observed that the working classes, even when visiting Maidenhead, didn’t bother to look at the landscape, gaze at the stars or listen to birdsong. Instead, they sat in ‘bogus Tudor bars’ and ‘talk of sports’ – activities that Betjeman saw as elemental to a masculine group who belch, possess double chins, cheat and tell dirty jokes.52 But he did recognise that football acted as a common cultural currency and bonded men together. In ‘The City’ what melded father, son and clerk was ‘talk of the Football Cup’.53 He also noted that men confined in prison spent their days talking about ‘racing and football’, suggesting that these sports were not only dubious activities but also opiates that took internees’ minds away from incarceration.54 Social bonding

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Figure 5.2 Games (John Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest)

is one way of looking at it: social control, through false consciousness, is another. Betjeman prefaced his apparently patronising comments on the working-class day-trippers who talked about sports while visiting the sights of Maidenhead with the caveat that it was not the young men’s fault that they belched and talked football rather than gazed at the stars. Betjeman pardons them and recognises that ‘they are helpless victims of a depraved system of values’.55 Forty years later Betjeman might have had to admit that the lower-middle and working classes may have possessed a degree of agency and that gazing at the stars was also a social construction. Indeed, Timothy Mowl suggests that in his later life he may have dropped the ‘tone of foolish contempt for “enjoyment of a distinctly popular nature”’, having gained pleasure from such mass events as variety shows and ballroom dancing (almost a sport) at the Palace ballroom on the Isle of Man.56 And although he may have disliked the idea of taking part in competitive sports, in his fifties he admitted to having a soft spot for certain professional sportsmen. In a column (titled ‘City and Suburbia’) that he wrote regularly for The Spectator during the mid 1950s he said that he had ‘always found professional sportsmen, particularly cricketers and golfers, the most generous-minded people as a whole, kind to each other and full of humour’. How many professional sportspeople he had actually mixed with and knew is unknown but at a ‘cricket dinner’ at Wantage he had listened to after-dinner speeches from an umpire and the Middlesex bowler Jack Young.57 He also knew John Arlott (the cricket writer and commentator) who stayed with the Betjemans ‘once a year as regularly as clockwork for the Wantage Cricket Club dinner’.58 Betjeman also pondered briefly the nature of sport, suggesting that ‘playing professional cricket must be the same sort of thing’ as performing in a variety show since each involved ‘a question of timing and feeling the mood of your audience’.59 As far as I am aware, that was his sole and spurious contribution to the philosophy of sport.

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Muscular females and Mr Pedder Sports: what Betjeman hated among the hearties, he loved among the ladies. When it came to women Betjeman regularly situated them in middle-class sporting contexts. Two of his poems are satirical views of the ‘horsey set’, inspired perhaps by his familiarity with (and dislike of) his wife’s horse-riding interests and equine fanaticism. His wife, the pukka Penelope Betjeman (née Chetwode), was an outstanding rider who got the eccentric Lord Berners to paint her with her Arab steed in a living room at her home in Farringdon.60 She had paid for her husband to have riding lessons by a ‘Berkshire horsewoman of great repute’ but he turned out to be a hopeless horseman,61 further confirming his sporting incompetence. He hated horses, stating that ‘I dare not ride. It frightens me [...] I am a coward to the very core in everything’.62 His sharp eye for detail led to a couple of poems that made fun of young women who exhibited riding-school and gymkhana behaviour. His poem ‘Winthrop Mackworth Redivivus’ features horse-mad Matilda and in ‘Hunter Trials’ he introduces the apparently useless pony-riders that included Diana, Prunella and Monica.63 Such types show that Betjeman’s targets were not necessarily the ‘working’ class but rather, as Derek Stanford suggests, bad taste, folly and presumption.64 Matilda, for example, had been subjected to the higher-income cult of psychoanalysis since she was aged three and later to that ostentatious code of gracious living, membership of the riding school. Having been horsemad before going to the twenty-guineas-a-week school, she ends up believing that she is a horse.65 ‘Hunter Trials’ is more slapstick and Betjeman utilises his knowledge of pony-riding jargon to illustrate the snobbishness and pretentiousness of the riding set. But it was the suburban tennis court rather than the downland riding school with which Betjeman’s females are most associated. The tennis court was frequently represented in his poetry as a feminine space but could also be read as a site of risk (of sexual violation). ‘A Subaltern’s Love-Song’ is almost entirely set around tennis. In it he introduced Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, a real person whom he first met – and with whom he became infatuated – while working for the Ministry of Information in London during the Second World War.66 She had been captain of lacrosse and tennis champion at Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, and Betjeman fantasised wildly about her as a ‘lovely sturdy Creole type with curly hair and strapping frame’.67 She was immortalised as being ‘Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun / What strenuous singles we played after tea, / We in the tournament, you against me’.68 He also dreamed of Myfanwy Piper (née Evans) who had studied English at Oxford and whom he nicknamed ‘Goldilegz’. She was an inspiration and a family friend but also another object of his sexual fantasies. She was said to be a champion swimmer and Betjeman recalled an occasion when they swam together in the Thames at Henley. He was ‘able to see her do the crawl and to feel the strength of her arms in the water. It was a memorable experience’.69 And on another occasion, in a blank verse letter to her, he described her ‘strong blonde body curving through

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the reeds / At Shiplake while I wait for you in the punt’. He expressed a need to ‘exercise control’ over himself as he reminisced about her ‘stalwart body’ that excited him, her ‘athletic curves’ and her ‘barelegg’d’ running.70 Additionally, in ‘Myfanwy’, he implied that she might be the object of ‘lesbian longing’:71 Were you a prefect and head of your dormit’ry? Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym? Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you? Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?72 If Lewis Carroll liked little girls, John Betjeman loved and fantasised about big, dominating, military, sporty women. They were nothing like Vladimir Nabokov’s tennis-playing ‘nymphet’, Lolita.73 The wartime ‘land girl’ was another of his model ‘types’ but his women may have had a prototype in his nanny or in Vera Moule, ‘one of those dominant sports girls’ to whom Betjeman was attracted.74 She had proven her physical prowess by throwing to the ground a mildly lecherous Heddon Court games master.75 In his poem ‘The Olympic Girl’ he states that The sort of girl I like to see Smiles down from her great height at me. She stands in strong athletic pose And wrinkles her retroussé nose.76 The apogee of Betjeman’s infatuation with sportswomen is arguably found in his ‘Pot Pourri for a Surrey Garden’. Here he masochistically adores Pam, a ‘great big mountainous girl’, a ‘zephyr, and khaki short girl’ with her ‘wonderful back hand drive’: See the strength of her arm, as firm and hairy as Hendren’s See the size of her thighs, the pout of her lips as, cross, And full of a pent-up strength, she swipes at the rhododendrons, Lucky the rhododendrons, And flings her arrogant love-lock Back with a petulant toss.77 Pam’s body hair contrasted with Lolita’s ‘pristine armpit’ that Betjeman would not have favoured, even though Lolita had, like Miss Hunter Dunn, ‘burnished arms’.78 In the ‘The Olympic Girl’ he continues: Oh! Would I were her racket press’d With hard excitement to her breast And swished into the sunlit air Arm-high above her tousled hair [...]

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Fair tigress of the tennis courts, So short in sleeve and strong in shorts, Little, alas, to you I mean, For I am bald and old and green.79 Betjeman’s outpourings here reflect what has been termed ‘geriatric lust’,80 a subject he returns to in ‘Senex’, a work that A. N. Wilson regards as his ‘kinkiest published poem’.81 Betjeman bemoans temptation: ‘Oh would I could subdue the flesh / Which sadly troubles me’ and the title of the poem might suggest the yearnings of a lecher. However, it signifies the regret of getting old and the inevitability of the ageing process, something that is of even greater significance to the serious athlete (see Houseman’s ‘Athlete Growing Old’) than to a man like Betjeman who permanently, rather than solely in the twilight of his career, saw himself as physically inferior. ‘The Olympic Girl’ featured the ‘outrageously phallic tennis racket’82 but in Betjeman’s further sporting-erotic allusions the bicycle took the place of the racket. He authored what has been claimed to be one of ‘the shortest, the oddest erotic verses in the language’: ‘I often think that I would like / To be the saddle of a bike’.83 And elsewhere he referred to the ‘fortunate bicycle’ that Myfanwy straddled as she pedalled her way home with her ‘black-stockinged legs under navy-blue serge’.84 As I noted earlier, a recurring feature of these girl-women is their size and muscular development, their sexual transgression tending towards the androgynous (recall Pam’s hirsute body). He wrote that ‘all my girls can always be interpreted as big strong boys’85 and though Betjeman felt ‘weak’ from Miss Hunter Dunn’s ‘loveliness’ she was also said to display ‘the grace of a boy’.86 Likewise, in the case of Vera Spencer-Clarke: [...] like a man she swung her arms, And masculine became her charms; With heavy stride she forward strode And threw my body on the road.87 Sometimes one gets the impression that masculine females permanently surrounded Betjeman. He referred to Eileen Molony, a BBC Talks producer in Bristol, as his ‘dark yellow-stockinged Amazon’88 and described one of his secretaries, Jill Menzies, as having a ‘boyish’ and ‘athletic’ figure.89 He voyeuristically and with fetishist energy devoured such women and recognised the frustration and tension between merely seeing them and caring for them. He explicates this tension in ‘Senex’: To see the golden hiking girl With wind about her hair, The tennis-playing, biking girl, The wholly to my liking girl, To see and not to care.90

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In ‘Youth and Age on Beaulieu River, Hants’ he finds a female (one Clemency Buckland)91 much more interesting than the activity in which she is engaged: Soft and sun-warm, see her glide – Slacks the slim young limbs revealing, Sun-brown arm the tiller feeling – With the wind and with the tide.92 A Freudian could, of course, make a considerable amount out of some of these verses (‘hard excitement’, ‘tiller feeling’) but this is not an avenue I wish to pursue here.93 This is sports poetry without the sport. The emphasis and admiration is on women’s physique, their grace, their power and their bodies. It is an early English-language example of the erotic in sport. The rationale for their physical performance did not particularly interest him; the sport was totally incidental. He may not have enjoyed sport but there is little doubt that he obtained voyeuristic gratification from watching manly women taking part in it. In this respect, Betjeman differed from Nabokov (or, more accurately, Humbert Humbert) who enjoyed both tennis and watching Lolita ‘with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilated’.94 For Betjeman, then, the tennis court and the river were simply sites for sexual and aesthetic gratification rather than supplying sporting pleasure. And ‘Betjeman, one feels, would not really have much enjoyed [...] tennis-parties’ but nostalgia for his boyhood and adolescence, common throughout his work, enhanced his view of them.95 The voyeuristic gaze, of course, is not restricted to ogling at women in their twenties and thirties. Sports and play provide sites for ocular pleasure derived from drooling at younger, sometimes much younger, females. In his poem ‘Beside the Seaside’ Betjeman touches on this menacing dimension of sport and play.96 He alludes to the early teenage Jennifer as ‘last year’s queen’ of ball games on the beach. But here is a case of playfulness with a sinister edge because the beach play is subject to organisation and scrutiny by the creepily named schoolmaster Mr Pedder (short for paedophile or, as Hillier suggests, for pederast?),97 who is the ‘friend of boys and girls – particularly girls’. His previous summer attraction to Jennifer, when ‘one smile from her sent Mr Pedder / Back contented to his lodgings’, is switched to Christabel. For Jennifer, this year there is ‘no friendly wallop on the B.T.M. / No loving arm-squeeze and no special look’.98 Betjeman suggests, I think, that Jennifer too might have enjoyed being played with in these ways. He seems to be raising the subject of childhood sexuality, not an uncommon theme in his poems. As Hugo Williams points out, ‘Who else would dare combine, as in “Indoor Games near Newbury”, a celebration of a middle-class children’s party with vaguely under-age lust, nicely rhyming “Choose your partners for a fox-trot! Dance until it’s tea o’clock!” with “You, who pressed me closely to you, hard against your party frock?”’.99 In Mr Pedder and party games Betjeman represents a darker side of play (of molestation, even abuse, or being played with), far from unknown in the world of sport.100

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Sports places It was not only as a poet that John Betjeman was a keen observer of the English urban and rural scene. Notably, he published several works on architecture and topography, publications in which he was able to expound his thoughts on change (not seen necessarily as progress) in the English environment. Among the things he disliked in the landscape were ugliness, greed, planning, standardisation, the erosion of difference and the lack of spontaneity. To these Ralph Mills has added ‘the welfare state of massive blocks of apartments, phoney effects and plastic objects, impersonality and psychoanalysis’.101 Somewhat ironically, Betjeman had at first embraced the modernism of Le Corbusier’s early architecture but later converted to the Victorian Gothic decorative style of, for example, St Pancras railway station and the nearby Euston arch. The nostalgic Betjeman would have readily identified with the writing of geographer Edward Relph on ‘placelessness’ or the anthropologist Marc Augé on ‘non-places’.102 When Betjeman wrote deploring the ‘sameness’ of British cities – at least, at ground level – he commented that when ‘the suburbanite leaves Wembley for Wells he finds that the High Street there is just like home’.103 How much more so is the sameness among, say, football pitches or running tracks. As Roger Bannister noted, having run on the standardised running track all over Europe, ‘I might just as well have run all my races at the White City in London’.104 The point I am making here is that while streets do not have to be identical in order to function, running tracks, tennis courts and football pitches do. The penalty spot should be the same distance from the goal line on every football field in the world; the running track has to be 400 metres in length for a world record to be broken. These are the rules. Pace Le Corbusier, a basketball court could be read as an instrument for scoring points, the running track a machine for breaking records. Topophilia Also recognisable in Betjeman’s writings is his sense of ‘topophilia’, a word used in the late 1950s by the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard to mean ‘images of felicitous places’ but often attributed to the humanistic geographer YiFu Tuan who, in the 1970s, defined it as ‘the affective bond between people and place or setting’.105 However, W. H. Auden had used the term in 1947 in his introduction to a selection of Betjeman’s work published in the USA, titled Slick but not Streamlined.106 Auden suggested that topophilia ‘differs from the farmer’s love of his home soil and the litterateur’s fussy regional patriotism in that it is not possessive or limited to any one locality; the practised topophil can operate in a district he has never visited before’.107 John Betjeman was such a person. Auden acknowledged that a ‘sense of place’ is not found in wilderness or merely ‘space’ but (like Betjeman) in places that are humanised and ‘interesting’: ‘A neo-Tudor teashop [is] as interesting as a Gothic cathedral’, he wrote.108 Nor could topophilia be achieved while travelling quickly and Betjeman’s leisurely bicycling satisfied the need for a ‘strongly visual imagination’ that would be lost at

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high speeds.109 Indeed, speed – arguably one of the essences of sport – was (like Sorley and Jerome) negated by Betjeman in his poem, ‘Inexpensive Progress’. He saw a life dominated by speed in which ‘All things travel faster / [...] Till only speed remains’ as an ‘age without a soul’.110 The sporting paradigm here, I suggest, is the 100-metre sprint. In his topographic writing Betjeman unquestionably achieved a breadth of regional coverage. But his topophilic sentiment is highly selective and it is not shown towards, for example, a football stadium or a greyhound track. For Betjeman, the ‘great industrial shrines’ built by the football clubs of ‘smokestack cities’111 did not seem to elicit the slightest interest or affection, even if his nostalgic evocation of place could be aided by sporting references and allusions. The use of sport in his writing is again illustrated in his evocative ‘Cheltenham’, in which he says: Floruit, floret, floreat! Cheltonia’s children cry. I composed those lines when a summer wind Was blowing the elm trees dry, As we were seventy-six for seven And they had C. B. Fry.112 He can critique the ‘English Public School run on over-muscular ThomasArnold lines’113 and dislike cricket because it is a serious sport, but he can use both as images that form part of a benign view of the English landscape on a summer’s day. And in ‘Love in a valley’ the Coulsdon woodlands are typified by houses where, deep down the drive ‘lies the tennis-court’.114 The tennis court, the cricket field and the golf course add to the scene, helping to create a sense of place – but not of sport. As Timothy Mowl has pointed out, ‘Betjeman needs the Surrey backdrop to make [muscular women such as Pam] significant’.115 For him, sport was not enough to do so. Betjeman’s avoidance of the homes of Britain’s major sports (football and cricket) is somewhat surprising given that in First and Last Loves he was more than happy to devote a chapter to ‘The Architecture of Entertainment’ among which he included fairs, exhibitions, concert halls and cinemas ‘that may be considered alongside church buildings’.116 Yet by the 1930s the football stadium and the cricket ground had become major features of the urban scene, attracting attendances larger than any of the other forms of entertainment that he deemed worthy of coverage. Yet the cricket ground came to be read as an icon of the pastoral idyll while Lowry’s equally iconic ‘Going to the Match’ placed the soccer stadium in its smoky, stygian setting.117 Among his landscapes of entertainment, Betjeman, the anti-modernist, dismissed sports grounds, giving the impression that they possessed no sense of place and were not worth writing about, except in the most cursory and negative way. It is only in recent decades that the British sports stadium has attracted any serious interest among architectural critics, notably through the work of Simon Inglis.118

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One of the key points about Betjeman’s view of architectures of entertainment was that these buildings, apart from churches, have nothing to offer when they are empty. His observation that ‘Nothing is more empty than a deserted fairground [...] [a]nd empty race-courses seem emptier than that’119 would apply equally to football or cricket arenas. It was their artefacts, or the people who occupy such places, that made them interesting for him. Extrapolating from his observations on other entertainment places, Betjeman would have disliked sports arenas for their functionalism, blandness and standardised designs. Of course, being sports places, the interiors (i.e. the playing areas) of stadiums had to be standardised, otherwise the games being played there would become meaningless. But even their surroundings were negated: ‘The sad wilderness of the White City [and] that mysterious area of minor Metroland around the Wembley Stadium’.120 Betjeman dismissed what later observers of the urban scene would recognise as having a degree of architectural merit.121 In his poem ‘Harrow-onthe-Hill’ he briefly refers to Wembley but it is not the sport that attracts him to what was, at the time, England’s greatest sports arena. All he says of Wembley is that the ‘Poplars near the Stadium are trembly’.122 And although he is pictured in his brilliant film ‘Metroland’ standing in the stadium, he makes the massively ironic understatement that ‘the site has become quite well known’.123 But the great games and the soccer stars who have played in the stadium are of no significance. Soccer receives no commendation at all. Indeed, in his poem ‘Essex’ he identifies the ‘half-land of football clubs’ that took up the space between London and Epping Forest.124 He sees football as a kind of sporting suburban blight, being neither one thing nor the other. It was as if tennis and golf connoted the old suburbs while football connoted the new. Provision for mass sport was one of the ‘realities of an expanding capital city’,125 brushing aside a lost idyll. The new landscape of the new suburbs, planned for the masses, tended to induce in him more a sense of topophobia than topophilia. A further cause for his dislike of sports places is likely to have resulted from what he called the impermanence that pervades them.126 Unlike churches, structures such as cinemas, exhibitions halls and, I would add, football grounds and other stadiums, were ‘built for daydreams of personal wish-fulfilment’.127 But football arenas don’t last long, compared with Betjeman’s churches. In the case of British football grounds, a state of locational flux existed in their geographic distribution during the 1910s and 1920s.128 They came and went though some may have remained in situ for several decades. In recent years there has been something of an increase in the pace of relocation of football grounds as clubs seek more spacious facilities for new, seated spectators. According to Betjeman, the White City and Wembley Stadium (respectively hosts to the 1908 and 1948 Olympic Games) seem to have been parts of projects that were ‘inspired by an over-confidence in success’. He didn’t condemn them but once ‘permanent’ he felt that they quickly looked out of date.129 In fact, their permanence was an illusion and they subscribed to the quality of impermanence noted above. Each of these Olympian sites was later demolished for more profitable use or transformed into a more sanitised structure.

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Playing with golf In his overall negation of sport Betjeman may have given the impression that golf was an exception. From time to time he played this relatively gentle and genteel sport. Indeed, his father had bought him a set of clubs (though they were rarely used)130 and in the mid 1950s he was said to have ‘often played’ at the Frilford Golf Club near Abingdon though it seems likely that he gained as much pleasure in joining ‘in municipal putting over the burnt grass at Finchley Park!’.131 However, even if he did have a go at golf, it was an activity that he (like Jerome K. Jerome) preferred to play alone, hence negating its sporting character. Betjeman wryly noted that the lone golfer ‘can quietly cheat to himself’132 – a brilliant subversion of the norms of serious sport. At the same time, however, some of his writing on golf provides rare allusions to the emotional and sensory pleasures that could be gained from participating in sport (rather than from gazing at a female participant). In ‘Seaside Golf’ a ‘glorious sailing bounding drive [...] made me glad I was alive’; ‘And spite of grassy banks between / I knew I’d find it on the green’.133 And in ‘The Hon. Sec.’ he shows how the golf club secretary saw in the course a much-loved place: He loved each corner of the links – The stream at the eleventh The grey-green bents, the pale sea-pinks, The Prospect from the seventh.134 But even in the case of golf most of the brilliance for Betjeman is found, not in playing the game but in the coastal view or the sound of birds and the sea. In ‘Seaside Golf’ the ‘splendour, splendour everywhere’ came not from a brilliant human performance but from ‘[...] Atlantic waves / slapping the sunny cliffs / Lark song and sea sounds in the air’.135 Trying to play golf, on a visit to Moor Park Golf Club in Hertfordshire, he couldn’t avoid playing the fool. Trying to tee off he failed to connect with the ball. He laughed at himself, guffawing ‘that wasn’t up to much’.136 And it’s funny that John Betjeman, ‘that arch-aesthete, should play golf at all’.137 Indeed, at Moor Park he was more interested in the exquisite clubhouse than his own performance. This again reveals a lack of interest in sport and a much greater engagement with architecture and landscape. As Taylor-Martin put it, ‘the backdrop has become more important than the play’.138 ‘By the Ninth Green, St Endoc’ Betjeman’s attention is focused on the surrounding landscape rather than the golf course,139 rather like the way that, in ‘Henley-on-Thames’, he never mentions the regatta.140 Even so, despite his dislike of planning and the erosion of nature by sport Betjeman seems to have accepted (or at least, failed to oppose) the planners’ decisions to allow the substantial growth of golf courses in Britain during the 1930s.141

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Betjeman and heterotopia I have noted above that the landscape of sport tends toward one of ‘sameness’. This might be termed ‘homotopia’.142 Betjeman’s avoidance of sports sites among his landscapes of entertainment may be because sports, more than most other modern cultural forms, have shown tendencies over time to create and occupy the most placeless sites of all. As noted earlier, it is enshrined in the rules of most sports that the sites they occupy must be clearly defined and that one such site must have the same spatial dimensions as any other. Through such ‘sameness’ sports become meaningful to participants, be they in London, Lausanne or Lagos. The sameness of the spatial parameters of sports also enables meaningful records to be maintained and broken and, at the same time, provides a degree of fairness.143 Betjeman would have also disliked the greed associated with sport – not only in the excessive salaries paid to professional sportspersons but also in the related greed found in the quest for record performances and in sports’ voracious demand for land. The synthetic nature of the modern urban environment was mirrored graphically in the changing sports environment, already observed by Charles Dodgson’s attack on the colonisation by cricket of the Oxford Parks. The dystopian landscape of sports as seen by Betjeman was revealed through the desires of the planners, the providers of facilities, to sanitise nature. Arguably Betjeman’s most explicit negation of sports appears in ‘The Town Clerk’s Views’ in which he wrote of the town planner: ‘Let us hear this cool careerist tell / His plans to turn our country into hell’, and ‘In a few years this country will be looking / As uniform and tasty as its cooking’. Explicitly applied to sport he added: ‘All fields we’ll turn to sports grounds, lit at night / From concrete standards by fluorescent light’.144 The meadow becomes a sports ground; freedom (spontaneity) becomes constraint (choreographed sports with their ‘game plans’). Concrete replaces timber; night can be made into day. After all, as Jerome noted, in serious sport nature is a nuisance and, if possible, must be eliminated. As the American philosopher Paul Weiss put it in connection with foot racing (but broadly applicable to all sports): ‘ideally a normal set of conditions for a race is one in which there are no turns, no wind, no interference, no interval between signal and start, and no irregularities to the track – in short, no deviations from a standard situation.’145 For Betjeman, the planner is shocked to see ‘the variations in our scenery’.146 It is difficult to think of anything that differs so greatly from Betjeman’s ‘unplanned untidiness’147 than a synthetic running track or a perfectly manicured football field. Standardisation was tantamount to ‘levelling down’148 and in the planning of Bournemouth (whose ‘voice is the twang of the tennis racket’)149 Betjeman recognised approvingly that ‘everything had to wind. Nothing had to be regular. [...] The place was carefully planned from its beginnings on the principle that nature abhors a straight line.’150 Compare this twisting and winding geography with the rigid geometries of football fields, running tracks, swimming

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pools and basketball courts. Straight lines dominate them; their dimensions are the same everywhere; they are a planner’s dream: geometry prevails. Imagine playing tennis on courts where the spatial dimensions differed from court to court; imagine soccer matches where the penalty spot was never in the same place. Sports would not make sense – though they may be more fun if their geometries were varied. Normatively speaking, sports sites should prohibit nostalgia. The French anthropologist Marc Augé suggests that if ‘a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’.151 Relations, history and identity are invariably part of the sporting experience but the norms of sport suggest that stadiums should be neutral sites, not partisan arenas; they should be modern, in extremis. Betjeman, for whom nostalgia was a prominent part of his writing, would have totally opposed such a dystopia. Leena Kore Schröder applies the term ‘heterotopia’ to Betjeman’s constructions of ‘Englishness’.152 She sees his impulse ‘not to project and preserve a unified sense of Englishness impacted on a monolithic national nostalgia, but to pursue and foreground its diversity’.153 Jocelyn Brooke concludes that Betjeman ‘cannot be conveniently be fitted into any literary category’154 while Schröder goes so far as to suggest that, with his incongruous juxtapositionings, Betjeman was something of a surrealist, at least in comparison with the ‘dreamy vision’ of the likes of, say, William Wordsworth.155 Betjeman was not a ‘nature poet’.156 He saw England from several points of view, relativising language and supplying an open-ended view of culture. He was equivocal about patriotism; he played with language, just as (it might be argued) he played with life. The notion of heterotopia, as used by Michel Foucault, has been mainly applied to discourse and language in the sense of, say, running against the linguistic grain.157 However, various scholars have given heterotopia a material presence. These include, notably, Kevin Hetherington and, to a lesser extent, the Marxist geographer David Harvey.158 Basically, these scholars see heterotopia as ‘sites of alternative ordering’, ‘places of otherness’ possessing an ‘incongruous condition’ and ‘unsettling spatial relations or an alternative representation of spatial relations’.159 I earlier referred to Betjeman’s distaste for urban planning and its homotopian ambitions, its tendency to create ‘non-places’ and ‘placelessness’. Such dislike of bureaucratic orderliness reveals that Betjeman, also, did not see heterotopia solely as a linguistic device. What has this got to do with sport? Betjeman’s personal transgression of a homotopian sports site was his collusion in the jape involving the careering car being driven over the isotropic plane of the cricket pitch. His preference for heterotopia was reflected in the old and the disordered, the traditional and the spontaneous. By comparison, sports require settled spatial relations, predictability and order. Perhaps the closest he came to being explicit about placelessness and sport was in his allusion to the cricket pitches at the Oxford University Parks where, he said, games are played ‘on those dreary levels of sparse grass’.160 This description is about as far removed as one can get from the bucolic idyll of the

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English cricket field, recorded by numerous romantics from John Nyren to John Arlott. There is little space for relativism in sport. It seeks to be a world of binaries – winning or losing; on the field or off it; in play or out of play; on the team or off the team. Betjeman would have preferred the Dickensian world of carnivalistic sport or ‘folk games’ as they are sometimes called. Here the fool and the jester have central places whereas in modern sport a fool’s destabilisation of a game is seen as risky. Tennis matches are not supposed to be about admiring the sexual qualities of the players. They are not designed as sites for sex or romance. But this is what they become in Betjeman’s writing. Bodies rather than results become the object of his fantasy and ambition. He subverts the norms of sport, turning tennis into erotica. Like Allen Guttmann (and Philip Roth in my penultimate chapter), he sees sport as athletic and sexy.161 But, without much doubt, he preferred the sex to the sports.

Concluding comments Some observers have read John Betjeman as a sort of ‘sports poet’.162 In the ancient usage of the word he was indeed a sport, a ludicrous one at that. My contention is that while modern sport features in many of his poems it is incidental rather than central. It is not explored but is occasionally made use of as a sign that signified the working classes, social control, or Amazonian women. Being a snob he saw most sport as part of mass culture and it is impossible to think of him even considering a serious critique of sport in the manner of Charles Dodgson. He clearly disliked achievement sport and at times sought to subvert it, the legacy of both being a sporting failure and suffering the misfortune of having a sporting father. It was all the more unfortunate that he attended a school and university where considerable emphasis was placed on being a sportsman. However, Betjeman’s puckish fun-making saw him survive in a desperately serious sporting world. In his topographical and architectural writing Betjeman negates sport mainly through omission. An implicit dislike of sport is articulated through his aversion to sanitised spaces, artificiality, constraint and geometric segmentation – all qualities of achievement sport. His omission of sites of sports from his list of ‘entertainment places’ further suggests not only his lack of interest but also his dislike.

6

Alan Sillitoe

So I thought: they aren’t going to get me on this racing lark, this running and trying to win, this jog-trotting for a bit of blue ribbon, because it’s not the way to go on at all, though they swear blind that it is. Alan Sillitoe1

In comparison with the writers discussed in the previous pages, Alan Sillitoe (1928– ) has made relatively few allusions to sport in his written work.2 However, in several of his writings he is, I think, more emphatically and unambiguously anti-sport than any other modern British novelist. The one thing that Sillitoe has in common with the writers considered in previous chapters is that he has never regarded himself as a sportsman. Yet his 1959 novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (the title of the book conceals the fact that it is a collection of short stories) is frequently alluded to as a classic of sports literature. Critics have hailed this prize-winning work as ‘more impressive’ than his slightly earlier but equally well known book, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and (for what it is worth) Roger Robinson rates it as the third best ever work of running fiction.3 Moreover, it has been argued that Sillitoe, more than any other novelist, ‘has explored in depth the existential possibilities of the metaphor’ of long-distance running.4 Despite the relative popularity of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, it has been suggested by Stanley Atherton that Sillitoe, in his overall work, failed to devote enough space to the ‘passionate concern with organised sport’,5 one of the most prominent features of working-class life. This assessment, I think, is only partly true. While Loneliness dominates Sillitoe’s contribution to anti-sports studies, several of his shorter writings, implicitly or explicitly, adopt a similar stance. For that reason, in what follows I incorporate several allusions and inferences to sports that appear scattered within his overall work. Having said this I suggest that Loneliness is as much about rebellion as running. In addition to writing Loneliness, Sillitoe also scripted the screenplay for the very successful film of the same title, directed and produced by Tony Richardson in 1962, and the movie, as much as the book, can be read as taking a relatively unambiguous anti-sport view. According to John Hughson, it ‘neither celebrates

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nor looks for its redemptive features’: indeed, it is ‘a relentlessly negative representation of sport as an agent of coercive socialization’.6 Allen Guttmann sees book and film as neo-Marxist approaches to sport, with the film (in which Smith is played by Tom Courteney) being, perhaps, more explicitly Marxist.7 The distinction between these two positions can be briefly stated. Neo-Marxists see sport as something that is intrinsically dehumanising, treating human beings as machines or factors of production. Neo-Marxism is less associated with Marx than with those of the ‘Frankfurt School’, including Adorno and sports critics such as the previously mentioned Brohm and Rigauer plus the Freud-inspired Gerhard Vinnai.8 The traditional Marxist view does not see sport as intrinsically wrong but as a body-culture that becomes perverted by professionalism, commodification and exploitation. Human personality is reduced to commodity, typical of capitalism. The Marxist also sees human performance reduced to the abstraction of statistics that are meaningful in the global marketplace.9 Was Sillitoe a Marxist? One American critic unhesitatingly dubbed him a ‘neoMarxian’ while another saw him as part of the 1960s British ‘new-left’ and ‘neo-Marxist in orientation’.10 Sillitoe himself has presented a degree of ambivalence about his political beliefs. He was (and probably still is) well to the left of centre, in the late 1970s stating that ‘I’m generally a left-wing person as far as politics goes.’11 Alan Sillitoe was born on a council-house estate in an inner-suburban working-class area of Nottingham.12 He is the only member of the group of authors considered so far who unquestionably had ‘working-class’ origins. Sillitoe claimed that his family was the poorest in their street. His illiterate father, whom he hated, worked as a tannery labourer who had long periods on the dole and often beat his mother. The daughter of a blacksmith, she was a part-time prostitute.13 Family rows and fights were commonplace and some of his cousins had spent time in remand homes. This background contributed to Sillitoe’s familiarity with the class system that pervaded British society, including British sports, and he was always aware of ‘them’ and ‘us’.14 His early education was in a ‘shabby, gloomy’ infants’ school and, at the end of his time in junior school, he failed to pass the dreaded ‘eleven-plus’ examination that, at the time, determined whether pupils went to the academically oriented grammar school or one of the maligned secondary moderns. His secondary education stopped at the age of fourteen when he entered the world of industry. He got a job at the Raleigh bicycle factory and, during the Second World War, helped in the manufacture of munitions.15 It almost goes without saying that he did not attend a university. Given this background it is difficult to imagine Sillitoe being unaware of sports, especially football (soccer) – the working-class British sport. The factory in which he worked must have echoed with discussions and debates about the two professional clubs by which Nottingham was represented to the wider world – Nottingham Forest and Notts County, their stadiums being on either side of the River Trent. He knew that workers in pubs talked about football and horse racing and bought the Football Post on Saturday nights. In spite of this he is utterly unambiguous about his negative view of sports: ‘I have never practiced

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any kind of sport. It has always seemed to me that sport only serves to enslave the mind and enslave the body.’16 This is not to say that young Sillitoe was physically inactive – or that he never took part in sport (see below). But with the contents of his first pay packet he bought a bicycle (rather than a pair of football boots) that he would use to explore the wider hinterland of Nottingham. His bike took him to the Peak District to the west and the Lincolnshire coast to the east. He also went swimming in the River Trent.17 At the age of seventeen he enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm. The selection board inevitably asked what sports he played and rather like Betjeman he ‘feigned an enthusiasm never felt, having all [his] life regarded sport as a waste of time’.18 He answered cricket, football, rowing and cycling – and his application was successful. The seeds of Loneliness may have been sown at this time, suggesting that the novella is in part autobiographical. Although he claimed never to have taken part in sport, he notes in his autobiography that he was made to take part in inter-flight football matches in which he even scored a goal. However, he insisted that he ‘only made a pretence of playing’, having been bullied by the ‘sports officer’.19 At eighteen he was required to do National Service and was conscripted into the Royal Air Force. He was based in Malaya where he worked as a wireless operator, a job that gave him plenty of spare time to think about life. Moreover, it gave him time to read and write and within two years he felt confident enough to think about writing seriously. Some of his future work was based on his National Service experiences. Following demobilisation he returned to England and was again given time to think when he was diagnosed as having contracted tuberculosis while in Malaya. The treatment included a lengthy period of convalescence. This illness would, in part, have contributed to his lack of participation in sports. Moving to France but still poor he dedicated himself to writing and achieved his first publication, a short story about a football supporter titled ‘The Match’ (see below) in a French literary magazine titled Carrefour.20 In 1953 he moved to Majorca, still poor and living in basic accommodation. Encouraged to write about his native Nottingham by Robert Graves, a resident on the island, he put all his efforts into writing the book that was to make his name, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In the world of modern British writing Alan Sillitoe is generally regarded as a writer of proletarian novels, a ‘social realist’, a member of the ‘kitchen sink’ school or an ‘angry young man’. It would probably be a compliment also to call his early work ‘fragments of dramatized sociology’.21 His other major work certainly fits these descriptions and forms a major focus for this chapter. The origins of Loneliness reside in a country walk during which Sillitoe spotted a runner in vest and shorts running down a lane toward a wood. Inspired, he jotted some words on a scrap of paper, ‘The loneliness of the long-distance runner’ and returned the note to his pocket.22 Some years later, in 1959, it was to become the title of his classic work. It may be worth noting that Loneliness, with its strong emphasis on class imagery – especially in the film – was written at a time when amateur athletics in

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Britain was giving way to hidden forms of professionalism (‘shamateurism’). Additionally, the Oxbridge grip on British sport was starting to wilt. The pristine image of Roger Bannister, the first four-minute miler, and his Oxford chums had, to an extent, given way to the middle- or working-class athletes such as Gordon Pirie and Derek Ibbotson.23 The emergence of such athletes was consistent with Sillitoe’s view of life itself. He held that while it may take longer than they might have thought, they could still make it: ‘People have always made it if they really had wanted to’.24

Running wild Simply put, Loneliness is an autobiography of a seventeen-year-old working-class youth named Smith who is the narrator–protagonist. In the book he is known only by the most common of English surnames and can hence be read as ‘everyman’.25 As a result of petty thieving he is sent to a borstal, in the film represented as a bleak Victorian pile called Ruxton Towers in Essex. In the late 1950s Essex did not carry its present-day negative connotations and is presented in the film as something of a wooded idyll, contrasting with the grime and grit of Nottingham, Smith’s home town. The governor of the borstal does not see incarceration solely as a punishment but also as rehabilitation. This, he believes, can be achieved by cultivating Smith’s running abilities. Cross-country running was initially established in Britain’s private schools as a counterbalance to mental development. With their rush of hormones, cross-country was a classic ‘ploy to eliminate students’ developing sex drives’.26 Not surprisingly, the borstal institutions borrowed these methods of channelling boys’ desires. In the movie, Smith is first suspected to be a sprinter but it soon emerges that he is more suited to longer distances. Through training he becomes a prospect for winning a five-mile cross-country race against another borstal. For the governor, an ex-runner himself, victory in the race would not only normalise Smith but also enhance him and his institution. As Robert Zeller points out, the British sports ethos, founded on the notion of ‘muscular Christianity’, is that ‘athletics are supposed to integrate the athlete more firmly into the social fabric, to make him a useful member of the community’.27 Smith deliberately loses the race. It has been described as ‘one of the most disturbingly effective parables of victorious defeat that has appeared in contemporary fiction’.28 There are several ways of reading the running represented in Loneliness. John Byars suggests that Smith’s running can be seen in three ways: 1 2

3

Heritage: Smith recalls that ‘running had always been made much of in our family, especially running from the police’.29 Test: Smith does not read his race as a means of establishing his superiority over others. He knows nobody can beat him. He intends only to beat himself. This can be regarded as an even bigger test than beating his opponents. Pilgrimage: Near the end of the race Smith recalls seeing his father, dead, with blood coughed up as a result of cancer of the throat. But blood symbolises

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Interesting though these interpretations are, I will read Sillitoe’s broader corpus that, I think, illuminates several readings of sport. These are sport as freedom, as expropriation and as resistance. Sport as freedom? The American novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote: ‘Running! If there’s any happier activity, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be.’32 Running can, of course, be a source for play, freedom and imagination, as in the case of children’s unselfconscious frolic and gambol, the kind of playfulness favoured by Charles Dodgson and Charles Sorley. In parts of Loneliness Sillitoe too presents Smith’s running as a simple, almost playful, release from incarceration. Smith, the prisoner–runner observes, ‘Sometimes I think I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up a path out of the gates and facing that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end.’33 Geographer Martyn Bowden describes Smith as ‘smiling, carefree, and genuinely happy as he runs free in his early morning training sessions’.34 The film reveals man in nature or, at least, in a tamed nature that nevertheless serves to counter the brutal townscape from which Smith has ‘escaped’, in which he was ‘imprisoned’.35 I touched on the tension between poetry and prose in Chapter 3 and can now take this ‘distinction’ further by noting Sillitoe’s poetic representation of Smith’s running. Serge Fenoulière has shown how prose can be poetic without necessarily the use of verse, noting that ‘poetry has never been the opposite of prose’. Fenoulière took, as an example, a lengthy sentence from Loneliness that corresponds to Smith’s visual images as he runs through the woods. He treated the sentence as if it was a verse and asks who could deny its fine, balanced rhythm. I have slightly recast his verse version by adding capitals to the start of each line, as follows: By the time I’m through my morning course, When after a frost-bitten dawn I can see a phlegmy bit of sunlight Hanging over from the bare twigs of beech and sycamore, And when I’ve measured my half-way mark by the short cut scrimmage Down the steep bush-covered bank and into the sunken lane, When there’s not a soul in sight and not a sound except The neighing of a piebald foal in a cottage stable that I can’t see, I get to think the deepest and daftest of all.36

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Though the final words suggest that there is a darker side to running than mere appearances suggest, the lyrical, poetic nature of this passage conjures up images of the English pastoral. In the movie this is reinforced by the repeated rendition, as background music of Sir Hubert Parry’s evocative hymn tune (published in 1916) for William Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’ (penned in about 1805).37 The prime idea of the hymn can be read as the need for ‘mental fight’ in order to build Jerusalem in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. It is arguably the most popular and ‘English’ of British hymns. Tony Richardson uses the hymn to signify the establishment. He uses the patriotic, stirring tune ironically when Smith rebels against an incompetent psychiatrist; when Smith reacts against the governor’s platitudes; and when the wardens beat up Smith’s rival; and even more ironically when a vicar leads the inmates in a robust chorus during an assembly. The abysmal life in the borstal is mocked by the use of ‘Jerusalem’ in the least pleasant situations.38 When Smith appears to be running in the woods and meadows, however, the music used in the film becomes a more jazz-like melody connoting ‘freedom’. In passing, it can be noted that from ‘a poem that urges a new Jerusalem to be won by mental might, Blake’s lyric has been transformed into a vehicle of easy ironies and emotional charges’.39 Smith is not foolish or naive enough to think that he is in any way ‘free’. Despite having been given ‘freedom’ to train (a contradiction?) he knows that while they call it a ‘progressive and modern place [...] they can’t kid me [...] Borstal’s Borstal no matter what they do’.40 The neo-Marxist view is that the freedom afforded to Smith is the kind that provides a tea break or a holiday – a brief respite before returning to more work: or, Smith’s case, the prison. Smith discovers that running is simply an extension of work. Such temporary freedoms are part and parcel of the production of ‘docile bodies’ in a disciplinary society, as described by Michel Foucault in his writings about the way various populations are regulated.41 Foucault observed that over time the punishment of criminal offenders became more discrete and less obvious. Rather than public flogging and executions, prisoners should be incarcerated and subjected to subtle surveillance. He drew on Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the ‘panopticon’, a central tower that was the source of the all-seeing gaze. Prisoners were never aware that they were being seen but were never sure that they were not. Smith’s training is, for most of his time in prison, subjected to the very kind of panopticised gaze described by Foucault. Smith soon spots that the prison guards ‘sit there like spiders [...] perched like jumped-up jackdaws on the roof, watching out over drives and fields like German generals’.42 Likewise, in the film the physical education instructor records his progress via the stopwatch and provides medical checks as the day of the race gets closer. However, the ability to monitor Smith’s movements fail to supply any information on what’s going through his mind while he is running. In drawing attention to the significance of surveillance in prison and in sport, Sillitoe pre-dates the interest in Foucault-inspired work among sports scholars. By the 1970s, however, Foucault’s notion of surveillance was quoted by the French neo-Marxist Brohm as perfectly illustrating the world of sports.43

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The comments on sports training by Finnish sociologist Juha Heikkala resonate strongly with Smith’s experiences. Heikkala notes that ‘sport and its training practices are both an instrument (medium) and an effect (outcome) of bodily discipline and regimentation’. Discipline is a prerequisite of sport. He continues: ‘Crucially, discipline and regimentation are also the effect of the practices of sport. The rationale behind victory is to make the body and soul transcend their current performance and excel, which in turn demands discipline.’44 Associated with this mindset that is, of course, that of the governor, are the gaze and commands of the trainer. Additionally, the athlete is subjected by his own reflexivity to the fulfilment of the trainer’s plans. In other words, the runner applies ‘techniques of the self’. Heikkala adds: in sport, external control by authorities is only half the story. Sport is not forced labor; it must be and does include a strong voluntary flavor. Significantly, the will to do better must also carry a strong internalised feeling of a ‘need’ of discipline and conformity to the practices necessary for achieving the desired goal. The eye of the external authority is accompanied with an internalized ‘bad conscience’.45 Crucially, it was the ‘feeling of need’ to win that Smith failed to internalise (or resisted internalising). At least, the need to win meant something different for him. He had no ‘bad conscience’ about ‘losing’. His kind of honesty dictated that in this race to win was to lose. Before leaving the question of ‘freedom’ it is salutary to return to Smith running in ‘nature’ but this time during the race. Smith is aware of the racecourse being a site of control. ‘You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you’ by various in-laws, he muses.46 Gillian Hanson suggests that the race’s course, its track, can be read as the whole of civilisation and the boundaries imposed by it. The circular movement that it represents contrasts with the upward, liberating movement of the intellectual or spiritual escape that takes place within it.47 In some parts of the film the runners appear to be turned into machines ‘with the perfect synchronisation of their hands moving in a very mechanical way’, rather like the pistons of a machine.48 The athlete has been visually constructed as a machine but the recognition of Smith and his team mates through this lens further reveals their lack of freedom. Indeed, just as machines eventually wear out, Sillitoe noted that in the world of serious sport ‘the true and human spirit of man is being killed there, the body wrecked and abused, and the heart broken’.49 This suggests an alternative ‘natural’ metaphor, namely that of the jungle as suggested for Smith’s life by James Gindin.50 The rural idyll – the pastoral – in which Smith runs turns out to be ‘the world of the jungle’ but having recognised ‘the facts of jungle life’ Smith learns that the governor ‘is refusing to admit the constant antagonism between the two warring sides in the jungle’.51 What’s more, in the jungle there is fear and Smith’s lyrical representation of training in ‘nature’ changes during the race when he recognises the fear found

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in his training runs. Without really knowing why he was running, he went on through fields he ‘didn’t understand’ and ‘into woods that made [him] afraid’. He recognised the danger of falling into steams that ‘would have cut the heart’ out of him and the danger of tripping over a tree trunk and breaking his neck or falling ‘into a disused well and stayed dead in the darkness forever’.52 In his last race Smith appears lost in the world and is also scared by it – a Kafkaesque reading perhaps.53 Sport as appropriation One of the key characteristics of modern achievement sport is that it is ‘representational’. By this I mean that the athletes represent an institution, be it a nation, a region, a city, a school – or a prison like Ruxton Towers. Such appropriation (or co-option) is revealed in the uniforms, victory ceremonies, national anthems and flags. This is a form of over-explicit patriotism or banal nationalism.54 In this section I want to explore Sillitoe’s writing of representation/appropriation at different geographic scales. Early in Loneliness, appropriation is stressed in Smith’s recognition of the governor’s use of we, as in ‘we’ want to trust you or ‘if you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you’.55 When encouraging Smith to win the important race the governor shows confidence in him by stating that ‘I know you’ll get us that cup’.56 ‘We’ and ‘us’ are the organisation, the conservative collective – ‘In-law blokes like you and them, all on the watch for Out-law blokes like me and us’.57 Sillitoe exposes ‘the hidden selfish motives [of the governor] who [is] exploiting the physical and athletic potential of [his] inmates for personal gain’.58 If he performs well, his status is reflected on the Daily Telegraph-reading governor and the borstal. ‘They made me a long-distance runner’,59 says Smith and in so doing he finds himself in a situation where his own running is also co-opted for the goals of the institution.60 In large part he was being used, being employed by ‘the system’. While the physicality of running might compensate for some of the incarceration that he suffers, he realises that the very establishment that he opposes has appropriated his running.61 It is during his training that Smith is able to engage with what he calls his ‘deepest’ and ‘darkest’ thoughts. But as John Hurrell suggests, the loneliness of the runner can be read as a result of his running ability, he is ‘always out ahead of the field; but he is lonely too, because he lives his life according to a “code” that denies him any joy in life, a “code” that consists, in fact, of the denial of the ordinary human pleasures’.62 Sillitoe also implies co-option in a short story titled ‘The Match’, contained in the collection of stories that form Loneliness. According to D. J. Taylor, ‘The Match’ is ‘an exercise in pure form, as perfectly conceived a story as [Sillitoe] ever wrote’.63 Sillitoe based it on his one and only visit to a football match, taken by his cousin to watch Notts County versus Bristol Rovers at Nottingham’s County Ground. Sillitoe claimed this work as his ‘one and only football story’, based more on his observations of some of the spectators than what was going on between the two teams.64

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Atherton suggests, wrongly I think, that ‘the match’, a game of football, ‘is only a means of focusing on the disturbed emotional state of the main character’, Lennox.65 It illustrates more than that. In it Sillitoe again recognises the way in which sport can co-opt sportspeople as part of the broader project of hegemony. Rather than focus on the sportsworker such as Smith, however, it is the sports consumer, the soccer fan Lennox, who is being co-opted. In this taut piece of writing Sillitoe shows how for ‘spectators as well as participants the importance of the “game” extends far beyond the vicarious enjoyment of fans’ team loyalties and the athletes’ personal accomplishments’.66 Through co-option, sports can have an intense effect on domestic relations. Lennox is working class, wears a cloth cap and swears. He works at a garage. He suffers from poor eyesight and is mocked by his workmates as ‘Cock-eye’. Worse, we learn that he is likely to lose his job because he clouted ‘the mashlad who had called him Cock-eye in front of the office-girl’.67 Given such a dismal existence his salvation lies in Notts County and football, the English workingman’s sport. The early part of the story is set in the County Ground, Nottingham, where Bristol Rovers are the visitors. The ground (never a ‘stadium’ in the fifties) was shrouded in December mist, supporters ‘stamping feet dead from the cold’; advertising boards above the stands told of ‘pork pies, ales, whisky, cigarettes and other delights of Saturday night’.68 Lennox and his younger ‘mechanic friend Fred Iremonger stand in the one-and-threes’.69 For much of the game Bristol were holding County, the score being 1 – 1. Sillitoe pays little attention to the match and focuses much more on the crowd. Football fans are not merely passive spectators. They support their team, urging them on with their shouts and songs, identifying with them by the colour of their scarves. Sociological and psychological research suggests that fans can influence the outcome of a game.70 However, on this occasion ‘Lennox somehow knew that Notts was going to lose, not through any prophetic knowledge of each home-player’s performance, but because he [...] hadn’t been feeling in top form.’71 And indeed, near the end of the game Bristol scored the wining goal but as a result of the failing light Lennox never saw it. Lennox is the classic loser, a man whose ‘drabness of life produces frustrations which destroy communication by perverting it into aggression’.72 Sillitoe clearly perceives that, with the decline of the Christian religion, the ‘one significant communal ritual remaining to the working class [was] organized spectator sport’.73 Football has, not surprisingly, been seen as a ‘surrogate religion’74 and, as Norma Phillips has pointed out, For embittered men whose jobs and homes have become arenas of indignity and discontent [...] the religious descent into the weekend oblivion of the football game may well be the one transcendental experience available. But it is a temporary one involving the risk of still further reaches of failure.75 Fred Iremonger is slightly less working class than Lennox. He is also more magnanimous in defeat. ‘They deserve it, I suppose’, he observed whereas Lennox’s

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reaction is that ‘the goalie’s a bloody fool. [...] He couldn’t even catch a bleeding cold. [...] Bloody team. They’d even lose at blow football’.76 Walking back to their terraced homes after the game the conversation turns to other matters. Fred suggests that if he had stayed at home with his wife he might have cut himself ‘a slice of hearthrug pie if I’d asked her right’. Lennox, drawing on the personal experience of an older man, replied that ‘all that’ll alter in a bit. You can bet on that.’ Fred disagreed, and reckoned, ‘it’s better after a bad match than if I didn’t come to one.’77 For Fred there is life, indeed sex, after defeat at the County Ground. For Lennox defeat is all there is. Football clearly provides him with an opiate that he cannot find elsewhere in life but, suggests Gillian Hanson, when he gets home we see how his frustration is ‘matched’ by the psychopathy brought on by his lack if vision.78 He senses that the house smells musty. His wife, overweight, aged 40 but looking nearer 50, presents him with two kippers while one of his daughters refuses to light the fire. Some satisfaction with his lot might return if he could relive the world of football so he gave one of his boys sixpence to fetch a Football Guardian, the early evening sports paper that carried the day’s results and match accounts. While waiting for his consumption of more football Lennox angrily orders a fresh pot of tea and, anger mounting, rejects the kippers but issues another order, this time for pastries. Mrs Lennox was familiar with such Saturday afternoon rants but now things had come to a head. ‘Why did he make Saturday afternoons such hell on earth?’, she asks herself. With a fury previously suppressed she shouts that he should make his own supper and follows this with a further ‘sustained tirade’. Lennox responds by throwing the plate of fish on the floor. Next door, Fred and his young wife Ruby listen to the row. She says, ‘Just because Notts have lost again. I’m glad yo’ aren’t like that’ – though the impression is that he probably will be. Shortly after, Mrs Lennox walks out with the children, leaving her soccer-besotted husband for the last time.79 This is a very compressed summary of the story but is clear that sport does not only appropriate sportsworkers but also sports fans. For Lennox football was not simply a refuge from work; it was also a refuge from life. As William Hutchings points out, to fans such as Lennox ‘a team’s dismal fortunes on the playing field even presage a crisis in the day to day relationships of family life’.80 In The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner sport comes close to dehumanising the sportsman. In ‘The Match’ it comes to dehumanise the fan. Sillitoe moves on to the international scale and again displays distaste for serious sports in his short essay ‘Sport and Nationalism’.81 Here it is nation states that appropriate or co-opt sportsworkers. He replaces Notts County at the national scale by the state that fosters ‘national spirit’ – not in an individual but in the nation as whole. It is well known that sport is a major force for national bonding. Traditionally, it was the ambition of many sportsworkers to represent their country, to wear the Union Jack on the official blazer. The borstal governor had hinted that Smith might do so when he suggested that one day he might ‘take up running in a sort of professional way’82 and in the movie the governor refers to the possibility of Smith representing Ruxton Towers at the Olympics.

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Guttmann regards this as the basic irony of the story. To represent Britain? That is the society that imprisoned him; he is being asked to join the enemy.83 In ‘Sport and Nationalism’ Sillitoe saw sport as the main ‘civilizing’ weapon of the modern world ethos, a way of enforcing collective discipline which no self respecting savage like myself could ever take to. Society was built on ‘competition’, and ‘sport’ is a preliminary to this society and an accompaniment to it. It is a sort of training ground for entering into the war of life.84 For Sillitoe, the nationalistic mentality witnessed at the Olympic Games and the patriotic rigmarole that went with them was perfectly illustrated at the 1972 Olympics at Munich. As a staunch supporter of the state of Israel he was devastated at the response of the International Olympic Committee following the assassination of eleven Israeli athletes by terrorist members of the Black September Movement.85 A one-day break in the programme was agreed, as a mark of respect for the murdered athletes. The fact that the Games were immediately resumed incensed Sillitoe. He wrote that the Games were restarted with ‘indecent haste’ that revealed the unwillingness of the organisers to forsake their pride and their financial investments. The athletes who continued to participate were, he said, ‘in the grip of their physical investment at the expense of all human feeling’.86 To return to the possibility that Smith might one day compete in the Olympics, Sillitoe adds that the Olympic torch is a flame of enslavement – ‘run from it as fast as you can, and that in itself will give you plenty of exercise’.87 Here again, he underscores the theme of sport as enslavement and dehumanisation. Sillitoe made similar allusions to the achievement-orientated ideology of the Olympics and, for that matter, of sports like mountaineering.88 In his book Key to the Door, Sillitoe, drawing on his National Service, returns to Malaya in the guise of the main character, Brian Seaton.89 He is a working-class but bookish character who faces the tension between being an avid reader and the masculinity of his social background. With some other British servicemen he sets out to climb a mountain that, he thought, would test his physical strength (and assure himself of his masculine credentials). But the climb turns out to be an anti-climax. Brian no longed deemed it worthwhile to reach the peak. When asked why the climbers didn’t seriously try to reach the summit, Sillitoe stated: I meant the mountain-climb to represent useless striving, the emphasis in ideas like patriotism. They were right not to go to the top because they would have got nothing in return but a view which could be obtained just as easily a little lower down.90 The ‘useless striving’ that Sillitoe alludes to could have equally been the citius, altius, fortius mentality of the Olympics, or of Heikkala’s comment:

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Why achieve? Undoubtedly there is not an athlete who has not asked himself or herself, ‘Why am I doing this? Why all this sweat and for what end?’ But athletes also know that in this question lies a danger; it is as if this question should never surface, because it would open the Pandora’s box of ‘groundlessness’ and irrationality of sport. It would crack the cultural shell of sport and reveal an empty interior, maybe with a faint smell of practices vital only to our far distant ancestors. What sense is there in straining oneself to run in circles faster than any other?91 And, to return to Michel Leiris, the French anti-sportsman who felt that there was something inside him that he might term ‘“defeatism”: What is the good of going to so much trouble for an undertaking that can only come to nothing?’92 Sport as resistance Observing the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin commented that they were ‘reactionary’.93 Sports, with their rule-bound conventions, their spatial and temporal standardisation, their quantification and geometry, and their lack of ambiguity, make them vehicles of conservatism. The Olympics, and by implication, achievement sport, could be compared with the industrial science of F. W. Taylor; that is, time and motion studies with the stopwatch analysing minutely the body-actions of workers/athletes. Such measurement, added Benjamin, was a test, not a competition.94 And for Smith it was also a test – not so much about beating other runners because he was so obviously superior – but a test of ‘honesties’ between his and the governor’s. The ethos of sport is to play the game and to do one’s best, within the rules. This was, of course, the governor’s conservative view. In his words, ‘we want hard honest work and we want good athletics’.95 If Smith is successful in his running he will return ‘into the world as an honest man’.96 However, Smith also claims to be ‘honest’: ‘I am honest [...] I’ve never been anything else but honest, and [...] I’ll always be honest. [...] I know what honesty means according to me.’97 Far from being dehumanised, Smith recognises that he is ‘a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he [the governor] doesn’t know is there’.98 His is a radical sense of honesty, one that confronts the governor and ‘demonstrates the utter impossibility of any compromise’.99 It is the ‘ideological-political problem of honesty’ that Vaverka sees as the central theme of the book.100 Is Smith’s action in losing the race an act of resistance? If so, against whom or what? Before considering these questions it may be worth briefly distinguishing between ‘resistance’ and ‘transgression’. Tim Cresswell suggests that the former is a deliberate act; the latter is more accidental or being ‘out of place’. He adds that transgression, ‘in distinction to resistance, does not, by definition, rest on the intentions of actors but on the results – on the “being noticed” of a particular action’.101 Two 1950s fictional characters from British boys’ comics – Alf Tupper (the ‘tough of the track’) and (William) Wilson – demonstrate this out-of-place-ness. The former

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is solid working class; the latter is a rural hermit.102 They transgress the world of championship running, stereotypically represented by Oxbridge toffs or state-aided Soviet zombies. Tupper and Wilson are out of place though not obviously displaying any planned resistance. Cresswell would prefer to see them as transgressors rather than agents of resistance. In Smith’s case, it is made clear very early in the book that he will deliberately not win the race. He has planned it and only the waning of his honesty to himself would prevent him from losing. The intentionality of the act defines it as, at least, a kind of resistance. Like Dodgson’s, Sillitoe’s books are transgressive, leaving the reader with uncertainties, confusion (and often a wry smile). Of course, anti-sport sentiments may have been read (rather than written) into these and other texts explored in this book in ways that the authors never intended. As Jonathan Culler notes, ‘Intention, text, context, reader – what determines meaning?’103 In the film the situation is very different. In order to develop further the social class conflict and retain tension for the viewer the inter-borstal race is changed into a symbolic inter-class race and Ruxton Towers competes not against another borstal but against Ranleigh School, a local private school. Their plummy accents and their pristine white tracksuits distinguish the Ranleigh runners from the borstal boys with their varied regional accents and black and grey running outfits signifying ‘them’ against ‘us’. Furthermore, in the film Smith’s decision to drop out of the race seems to have been made during its latter stages and is not planned in advance, as represented in the book. In the film version it is not clear what Smith’s objectives are as he lines up for the race though his best friend Mike, who seems disenchanted by Smith’s participation, is heard to shout out, ‘Whose side are you on?’ For much of the race Smith runs in second place with Gunthorpe (played by a very young James Fox), the public school runner, building up a substantial lead. During the race Smith experiences flashbacks to his upbringing and his visit to Skegness where he frolicked in the sand dunes with his girlfriend. It is then that he sees that the alternative life would be to join the ‘in-laws’ but that would be dishonest to himself. Nearing the end of the course he overtakes his adversary, increases his speed and approaches the finishing line, well ahead. He hears the cheers of the crowd, urging him on. But urging him on to what end? To win the race (accepting the governor’s values) or to lose it (accepting Smith’s)?104 The climax of the race is in a public space and has ‘a sense of enforced gaiety, a carnival air, an order soon to be reversed’.105 As the race nears its end Smith recognises that it would, in his terms, be dishonest to win the race for ‘them’. Within sight of the finish he slows down and stops, simulating exhaustion. He stands, defiantly facing the spectators with his hand on his hips (Figure 6.1). The Ranleigh runner closes on him and momentarily slows down, almost stopping, astonished by Smith’s behaviour. As he does so Smith mockingly bows to him and waves him on to victory. As the gazes of the governor and Smith meet, the latter seems to smile, ironically.

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Figure 6.1 The crucial moment. Smith stands defiantly facing the crowd at the finishing line as his opponent moves to overtake him (author’s photograph, MGM films)

How resistant? Smith uses his time away from his crowded dormitory, apparently ‘free’ on his routine runs, to reflect on his life and the way in which he can use his running as a form of resistance: but resistance against what? Perhaps the British class system (the ‘In-laws’ and the ‘Out-laws’ as he puts it) that so permeates his being? After all, it is Smith who stated that if he had his way he’d line the ‘In-laws’ (a motley crowd including cops, governors, posh whores, pen-pushers, army officers, Members of Parliament) up against a wall and ‘let them have it’.106 This would suggest a Marxist view based on the centrality of class in British society. To be sure, Bowden describes Smith as a neo-Marxist athlete and Guttmann reads the race as a moral triumph over those who have deprived, injured, and humiliated Smith.107 One of the censors of the British Board of Film Censors whose job it was to scrutinise the script felt that the story was ‘blatant and very trying Communist propaganda’.108 This response was not dissimilar from that of the rugby league authorities to David Storey’s This Sporting Life who saw it as a brutal portrayal of the sport and disowned it.109

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Or is his resistance directed against his individual adversary, the governor, with whom he engaged in a pact to run for the borstal? As Vaverka notes, Smith’s rebellion is too solitary and immature to be genuinely effective. His thoughts and actions must develop even further, beyond the self, if he is to help bring about a qualitative change, leading to a positive improvement of his social circumstances.110 Likewise, Fenoulière suggests that Smith’s stratagems ‘would make no sense if the conflict were a mere opposition between two social classes. If it were so, we cannot see why the runner could not prove his superiority with winning the race.’111 And Hughson adds that Smith’s individualist spirit sits incongruously with his collectivist rhetoric, his individualism militating against the formation of brotherly bonding and political engagement.112 Indeed, he seems to have subscribed to the prevailing ideology of ‘every man for himself’ or ‘I’m all right Jack’. As Smith thought, while running, ‘You should think about nobody and go on your own way.’113 His emphasis is not placed on social class but individuality. His honesty is at an individual, nonconformist level.114 Ultimately it could be argued that Smith is still influenced by the social philosophy of the establishment, that is ‘the dominating ideology of individualism’.115 And this seems to have been Sillitoe’s own view: ‘As a writer’, he said, ‘I never see people in class terms [...] I’m a believer in merit, in intelligence, in making your own way’,116 though still, presumably left of centre. Smith’s gesture is a pseudo-failure. His losing the race seems similar to Steven Connor’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s ‘will to appropriate one’s failure, to live it and be it, is the effect of that absolute putting oneself in play’.117 Smith is playing a game against the governor and, at the same time, taking part in a sporting event. As Connor says, the ‘losing that Beckett has in view is not defeat; rather it is an active striving and contriving to outwit, or win out against winning’,118 confirming the view that Sillitoe has ‘elements of anarchism in his work’.119 Such closeness to an anarchistic view is supported by Jeff Ferrell who notes that while Smith undermines his own hope of freedom, at the same time ‘he undermines the labyrinthine rules and regulations, the daily degradation and obsequiousness, the phoney ideologies of competitive loyalty to the institution and the state’.120 In a sport like foot racing or football it is difficult to display resistance while one is actually taking part. Unlike other cultural forms such as writing or painting, resistance is negated by the tight ‘game plans’ within which sport is organised in a highly choreographed way. Teams and individuals have to play the (same) game. Of course, it is not known how many sportsworkers have, unknown to the rest of the world, adopted Smith’s strategy. There may be hundreds or thousands who have feigned injury to get revenge on a trainer or coach but as far as I’m aware, no research has been done on this subject. The race over, Smith is back where he started – ‘carting dustbins about every morning’ and ‘scrubbing floors in the evening’. His withdrawal from the race, that reflected his withdrawal from society,121 is now reinforced by an extension of

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his imprisonment. Indeed, it is worse than when he started since basically he is punished by having to do hard labour. On the other hand, his fellow inmates knew that he lost the race on purpose and they ‘never had enough good words to say about him’.122 He had achieved a sort of heroic status. The system had failed to break him; indeed, it had made him ‘stronger in many ways’.123 To suggest, however, as Stanley Atherton has done, that Smith ‘develops into a vociferous advocate of working-class grievances against the middle-class establishment, not a track star’, is, I think, something of an exaggeration.124 Atherton is much nearer the mark when he alludes to Smith’s ‘rebellious gestures’ that ‘reflect as much a muscle-flexing egotism as a desire to reform a corrupt society’.125 Or, as Vaverka put it, ‘His protest against the system is, in practice, sooner defiant than revolutionary.’126 Or, as Hanson suggests, as he loses the race Smith ‘understands that winning doesn’t necessarily entail running, if running means ignoring one’s own will.’127 On the other hand, John Slack sees the final part of the story as a kind of ‘ironic inversion’ of the two main characters, Smith and the governor – the ‘Out-law’ and the ‘In-law’. Smith’s personal conflict with the governor and all the ‘In-laws’ has apparently succeeded in partially rehabilitating these overly optimistic reformers, the governor and those whose utopian (and naive) beliefs in social salvation and successful reprogramming from games of football and cross-county running. They ‘now seemed resigned to the fact that not all boys are redeemable through physical and athletic discipline’.128 For Sillitoe, ‘a sporting chance is no chance at all’.129

Concluding comments Sillitoe’s writing on 1950s working-class life, through the lens of Colin Smith, might be at first thought of as an example of a rogue’s tale or a thief’s autobiography. Such works traditionally sought to alert readers on how to avoid falling prey to the rogue or thief and to lead the reader to virtue by the terrible acts of its opposite. Such stories have the repentant criminal as their moral.130 In the case of Sillitoe’s narrator, Colin Smith, he remains unrepentant and the story’s mood fails to promote the cause of virtue as opposed to vice. Smith maintains his integrity while under the authority of those he despises. For him, honesty is not an absolute term and the governor and the criminal will never see eye to eye. For some critics, Sillitoe, through Smith, seems to be sowing the seeds of revolution. For more hardcore Marxists such as Vaverka, however, Smith displays defiance rather than revolution. For students of sports studies, Sillitoe’s writing makes explicit the anti-sport position more strongly than any of the other writers that I have explored in this book. He recognises sport as a myth, seeing it as a form of social control or an ideological state apparatus. He presents sport as a form of oppression, both through Smith’s lens and his own perspective on the Olympic Games.

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And specially, from every shires end Of AMERICA to COOPERSTOWN they wende The holy BASEBALL HEROES for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were SIX. Philip Roth1

Despite America’s apparent love affair with sports, a number of American authors ranging from Mark Twain to Ring Lardner and Arthur Miller can be included among canonical figures of anti-sport writing. Another such author is Philip Roth (1933–). His work has largely focused on aspects of identity in modern American life but of significance to this book are his frequent references to the world of sports, notably baseball. Few of his works avoid at least some allusions to one sport or another. This interest is part of a wider concern in his writing with the (mainly male) body, ‘its strength, its frailty and its often ridiculous need’.2 Additionally, it has been said that Roth creates ‘indelible portraits of men embodying and suffering the deformities of American masculinities’3 – mental and physical deformities often brought on by the legacy of involvement in sports. At the same time, however, he is uneasy about modern sport in the USA, in large part the result of his being ill at ease with the USA per se. Several observers have read Roth’s work as being controversial and the widespread admiration for his work has not prevented him from being accused of conservatism, leftism, anti-Semitism, self-hatred, misogyny and pornography. In contrast to the writers discussed in previous chapters Roth might be called a sports fan, though one who has had a love–hate relationship with sport and sportspeople. He is a master satirist and his comic lampoons are often aimed directly at sport in the USA. Laughter and humour are widely used as his critical tools, ‘as revenge against things as they are’.4 Roth uses ‘comic irony to mock rational methods of solving contemporary problems’, including those relating to sports.5 He has also been read as a postmodern author in the sense of his blurring of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, being playful with language and text, and mixing genres. Additionally, he explores the notions of myth (i.e. fiction), particularly with regard to sports heroism and the sporting pastoral. In this respect Roth is an important representative of

Philip Roth 113 the demythologising school of American sports fiction.6 Furthermore, he provides insights into the writing or the representation of sports. He reminds us that ‘memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts’,7 wise advice to all sports biographers. He is also interested in the 1960s turn to the question of who writes (author = authority?), who is written about in (sports) history, and who is left out. Additionally, he seeks to illuminate the continuum between his ‘two closest friends’, ‘Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness’.8 He also asks how is the ‘real’ world (of sports or anything else) recognisable in the imaginary? Indeed, he suggests that the seemingly unbelievable quality of much of modern (sporting) reality or ‘hyperreality’ (the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy) serves as a serious impediment for a writer of fiction.9 To overcome this impediment there seem to be ‘good reasons for the writer’s retreat from the “actual” into the freer latitudes of the romantic and the fantastic’,10 which Roth most certainly does, particularly to the fantastic. There may be plenty of ‘sports fiction’ around but, as Frank Kermode commented, what distinguishes Roth is his outrageousness and ‘considerable feats of imagination [that] are required to produce a charge of outrage necessary to his purposes’.11 For if nobody feels outraged his entire plan has failed. In this chapter I first want to place Roth’s work within his own sporting and social background. Second, I outline mythological dimensions of writing American sport and, third, demonstrate in rather more detail Roth’s attempts to demythologise American sports. In doing so I read demythologisation as an antisport position and make an extended reading of two of Roth’s works Goodbye, Columbus and The Great American Novel in which I highlight his fun-poking and satirising of serious sport and consider his rejection of the myths surrounding sport in general and baseball in particular. I conclude with some of Roth’s thoughts that indirectly critique traditional sports writing.

Weequahic High and beyond Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Jewish motifs pervade much of his work. His parents were lower middle class, his father working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Philip Roth attended Weequahic High School12 in Newark and subsequently the Newark Colleges of Rutgers University for a year before transferring to Bucknall University and then to the University of Chicago. He subsequently taught in several American universities. By the age of 26 he had published the best-selling Goodbye, Columbus (a novella that he had written by the age of 22 and, like Sillitoe’s Loneliness, made up of several short works) that set him up for a life as a writer. He became a sort of ‘literary celebrity’ following what is, perhaps, his most well known work, the audacious Portnoy’s Complaint, which focuses on a subject that few students of leisure studies have ventured to research.13 Portnoy’s Complaint earned him over a million dollars prior to publication.14 Roth proceeded to amass many prizes for his written work and is today regarded as one of the major writers of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America.15

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Boyhood, baseball and boxing Roth has made several allusions to his early love of sport that provide insights into the life of a Jewish boy in 1940s inner-city America. When he was ten he would collect baseball cards and take a baseball bat, ball and glove to bed with him. But he was no more than ‘an average playground player’ and was disappointed that he never made the high school team.16 However, he knew that playing baseball ‘was not what the Jewish boys of [his] lower-middle-class neighborhood were expected to do in later life for a living’.17 If he couldn’t play for his school he could support it – and later write about it. Sport created a sense of both America and being an American by ‘following the major-league clubs on their road trips and reading about minor leagues in the back pages of The Sporting News’.18 For him it was a ‘kind of secular church’ and a ‘game so grand and beautiful’.19 He could also find national identity in the National Anthem, not so much because it was played daily in the school classroom but more because it was heard at the Sunday ballgames at Newark’s Ruppert Stadium where the Newark Bears would play the hated enemy, the Jersey City Giants. Given this life-long interest, it is not surprising that when it comes to sports Roth knows what he is talking about. In his novels he recalls the names of many American sports heroes, from baseball to boxing and from administrators to athletes. He knows that a runner who cannot better seven minutes for the mile is not much good and that it would take a top-class high school sprinter to run the 100 yards in 9.9 seconds. He (but not many of his readers) knows the name of the 1948 and 1952 Olympic decathlon champion. He knows the difference between the shot-put and the discus throw. And as for baseball, he includes it in many of his books because ‘it happens to be one of the few subjects [he knows] much about’.20 Against the grain of conventional Jewish attitudes, Roth was also attracted to boxing and studiously followed the rankings and performances of the champions. He even subscribed, for a short time, to Ring, a popular boxing magazine.21 Given that the student body at Weequahic High was 95 per cent Jewish, the school’s sports teams served to represent not only the geographical community but also the cultural realm of Judaism. Despite rarely winning a game Roth recalled the chant shouted from the stands, intended to boost the team but also to boost their Jewishness: Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam, We’re the boys who eat no ham, We play football, we play soccer – And we keep matzohs in our locker!22 The Weequahic boys may have been beaten regularly at football by the goyim but Jews ‘could not commit [their] hearts to victory in such a thuggish game, we were superior!’23 Losing a football game didn’t matter for superior beings and they had other things to be proud of. As Alexander Portnoy’s Aunt Clara would have put it, ‘Let them knock their heads together for “glory”, for victory in the ball

Philip Roth 115 game.’24 There was no need for such ridiculous pleasures and this reflects the tension between Roth’s love and dislike of modern sport. However, the allegation that preference for non-violent sports was a ‘Jewish’ trait is hardly confirmed by the disproportionate number of boxers from the early 1900s to the 1950s who were of Jewish extraction. Jews were also substantially employed as coaches and managers.25 While Roth wrote that ‘unrestrained physical aggression was considered contemptible’ and ‘repugnant to Jewish instincts’,26 the non-aggressive Jew may have been the stereotype and many Jews will have felt pride in the numerous pugilists who ‘represented’ them.27 ‘Muscular Judaism’ in the form of professional boxing is generally read as a way out of the ghetto and/or exploitation. The notion of ‘muscular Judaism’ mimicked ‘muscular Christianity’ and had been established following the exhortations of Max Nordau in the late nineteenth century. Nordau stressed the need for Jews to improve their health and physique in the face of what he perceived as degeneration – an image that had been peddled, to a large extent, by antiSemites.28 Roth recalls many of the muscular Jews, seeing them as ‘strange deviations from the norm and interesting for largely that reason’.29 His father and friends passed on to him the names of the great Jewish boxers among whom were Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, Max Bear and Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom. The latter was, in Roth’s non-aggressive scheme of things, ‘a more miraculous Jewish phenomenon by far than Dr Albert Einstein’.30 Later Roth would refer his readers to the Jewish boxing coach Doc Chizner in The Human Stain and use boxing metaphors in charting the rise and fall of ‘Silky’ Silk. The power of popular culture such as radio and sports may have been instrumental in assimilating Jewish boys ‘from insular, parochial neighbourhoods into the common language of American life’. As Mark Shechner observes, popular culture ‘overpowers the Jewishness of the home, which though a bastion of tribal solidarity and old world vulnerability, lacks entirely a devotional content and is no match for the robustness and daily presence’ of radio, film and sport: ‘The family dinner? But Jack Benny is on! Rosh Hashanah? But Mom, the World Series!’31 Likewise, in Roth’s words, ‘the collective memory doesn’t go back to the golden calf and the burning bush, but to [...] double features at the Roosevelt [cinema] on Saturday afternoons and doubleheaders at Ruppert Stadium watching the Newark Bears’.32 For the likes of Roth, how could the synagogue compete with the stadium? And if they were not supposed to adopt the rough and tumble of boxing or football, these sports could hardly fail to appeal to those ghetto boys who rebelled against the values of the schul and shtetl. So, in opposition to the ‘nice Jewish boy’ image, Alex Portnoy esteemed his rebellious cousin Heshie who played football, was a javelin thrower and became engaged to a shiksa baton-twirler. Roth also recalls the downside of high school sports. Intra-school cohesion was often confronted with inter-school rivalries that included brawls and fights with kids from different neighbourhoods representing different schools (and ethnicities). Roth remembers a rare game in which the Weequahic High School football team, the weakest in the city of Newark, actually beat a rival school, Barringer. In his memoir, The Facts, he records that as the game neared its end,

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rival fans from the other side of the stadium headed towards the Weequahic boys who just managed to avoid a battle by getting into a bus that was subsequently, but unsuccessfully, attacked by the opposition. Roth noted that his flight from the ‘violent melee’ recalled to him the ‘collective memory of Polish and Russian pogroms [that] fostered [...] the idea that our [i.e. Jewish] worth as human beings, even our distinction as a people, was embodied in the incapacity to perpetrate the kind of bloodletting visited upon our ancestors’.33 Such behaviour was traditionally called ‘school spirit’ and it took neo-Marxist observers such as Herbert Marcuse and Paul Hoch to stress that ‘high school nationalism’ could be the breeding ground for, among other things, a ‘nationalistic mentality’.34 Soon after arriving at Bucknell Roth’s love of baseball was replaced by a devotion to literature. While there he started to critique sport, finding himself strongly opposed to the sport-orientation of undergraduate life, writing that students should abandon their ‘high school values’ that included their obsession with football.35 Nonetheless, he never lost an enthusiasm for sport (especially baseball, the so-called ‘American pastime’); nor did he allow himself to get unfit and into his later life swam and worked out daily.

Roth as sports ethnographer Philip Roth’s engagement with sport is revealed in his keen eye for detail and his ability to sensitively record attitudes and places, hence producing a sense of sport. Christian Messenger suggests that Roth created two styles, one that was serious and paid attention to detail (realist) and another that was highly satirical with ‘sustained comic power’.36 I will deal with Roth’s comic representations later and at this stage seek to explore his sensibility in representing sport and its environment. Sander Gilman has noted that Philip Roth often has his ‘literary works read as social science texts’.37 For example, the noted anthropologist Sherry Ortner (who was also a student at Weequahic High) sees in Roth not only a writer of the highest class but also ‘a brilliant ethnographer’.38 Jonathan Schwartz recognises Roth as a ‘quasi-ethnographer’ who writes the kind of ‘thick description’ practised by Clifford Geertz and seemingly sets no limits to his ‘close-range observations and minute memories’.39 In several of Roth’s books, he displays what Shechner calls a ‘dogged encyclopedism’ for sport (along with a wide range of other subjects), born of his early years in Newark.40 George Searles suggests that Roth is also a social historian and it seems to me that he also exhibits skills as a cultural geographer.41 This claim is based on Roth’s ability to evoke a sense of the physical surroundings within which his characters act out their personal dramas. Consider the following: During the fall he would usually walk back out to the high school late in the afternoon to watch the football team practice, and stay on until it was practically dark, moving up and down the sidelines with the plays. Close in like that he could hear the rough canvasy slap! as the linemen came together – a sound he especially liked – and actually see those amazing granite legs of Tug

Philip Roth 117 Sigerson, which were said to never stop churning, even at the bottom of a pileup. They would pull ten guys off him and there would be old Tug, still going for that extra inch [...]. [S]uddenly he would have to go scattering back with the little crowd of spectators, as one of the halfbacks came galloping straight at them, spraying chunks of dirt so high that on his way home Roy sometimes found a little clump of the playing field in his hair. ‘Boy’, he’d think, breaking the earth in his fingers, ‘that kid was movin’, [...]. Bobby Rackstraw, the spidery quarterback, [was] up on his toes piping out the signals – ‘Hut one hut two’ – and then, just as the ball was snapped, looking up to see a faint white moon in the deepening sky over the high school. For the hour of the day, for the time of his life, for this America where it is all peacefully and naturally happening, he feels an emotion at once piercing and so buoyant it can only be described as love.42 Is this part of an ethnographic study of sport? Or is it an extract from a novel? If a straight answer can be given to these questions then I must assume that there is a clear distinction between the two. But on what basis? And why? Geographer Derek Gregory reminds me that ‘ethnographies are fictions, in the literal sense of fictio – “something made”. And there are no end of ways in which they can be made’.43 In fact, the extract quoted above is an example of Roth’s sensitive writing about sports places, found in When She was Good. In it he carefully describes the high school sports environment and its meaning to Joe Bassart who, in his first months back home from the army, often revisited his alma mater. Sport is here seen as being central to feeling American, to having a sense of identity. Sport is orderly like the seasons and hence, in its way, peaceful. High school sport has created a love of place, a sense of topophilia, an essential America, almost the pastoral. Read another way, however, sport is ideological and has served as a state apparatus that has provided a form of social control. Roth is also sufficiently skilful in the difficult task of writing corporeality – writing the body moving in sporting space. The body in baseball is represented in Portnoy’s Complaint thus: Oh, and there is really nothing in life, nothing at all, that quite compares to that pleasure of rounding second base at a nice slow clip, because there’s no hurry any more, because that ball you’ve hit has just gone sailing out of sight [...] And I could field too, and the further I had to run, the better. ‘I got it! I got it! I got it!’ and tear toward second, to trap in the webbing of my glove – and barely an inch off the ground – a ball driven hard and low and right down the middle, a base hot someone thought. Or back I go, ‘I got it, I got it –’ back easily and gracefully toward the wire fence, moving practically, in slow motion, and then that delicious Di Maggio sensation of grabbing it like something heaven-sent over one shoulder [...] Or running! turning! leaping! [...] Or standing nice and calm – nothing trembling, everything serene [...] standing there loose and easy, as happy as I will ever be, just waiting by

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The same questions could be asked as those following the earlier quotation from When She was Good. This could have been written by a reflexive sports scholar or by a polished novelist. These examples of blurring the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’ serve to ‘shatter the convention of a single author, outside the text and surveying, with a single gaze, all that happens inside his text’.45 In another example, Roth evokes an erotic dimension in sports. In The Professor of Desire he describes two ways of seeing the bodily movements of a group of cheerleaders: There is a cheer wherein each of the girls on the squad places one fist on her hip and with the other rhythmically pumps away at the air, all the while farther and farther back from the waist. To the other seven girls in brief, white, pleated skirts and bulky white sweaters the sequence of movements seems only so much a peppy gymnastic display, to be executed with unsparing energy and at the edge of hilarity. Only in the upturning belly of Marcella Welsh is there the smouldering suggestion (inescapable to me) of an offering, an invitation, of a lust that is eager and unconscious and so closely (to my eyes) begging to be satisfied.46 Here, like John Betjeman, Roth reveals the possibility (perhaps probability) of sport as a source of erotic reactions. It is not just a basketball game he is watching (if at all!). While some spectators love a great athletic performance others prefer the teenage sexuality of the cheerleader.47 Like Roth’s view of the physical environment of sport, these allusions to bodily movement may appear frivolous or romantic but, as I shall show, careful observation can also reveal that he contributes to the demythologising of long-held values and beliefs, ‘making sense’ of the world of sport in different ways.

Myths of (American) sports For Roland Barthes, myths often serve to naturalise the cultural, that is, to make dominant historical and cultural values and attitudes seem natural, normal and reassuring. In this way they appear as ‘true’ reflections of ‘the way things are’ and go unquestioned.48 ‘History’, on the other hand, has been said to be a ‘powerhouse of change which destroys custom and tradition’.49 A major outcome of Roth’s work in relation to sport is the demythologising of two dominant and traditional myths that have historically surrounded American sport. The first is the sport pastoral and the second is the sporting hero. In the pages that follow I point to ‘traditional’ views of these two myths and deconstruct them before finally – and more fully – exemplifying their mythical status with a close reading of Goodbye, Columbus and The Great American Novel.

Philip Roth 119 The sporting pastoral By ‘pastoral’ I mean an idealised, cultivated landscape lying somewhere between the metropolis and untamed wilderness. In England the idealised mythology of the pastoral has been found in the writing of cricket while in the USA it is baseball that has been widely associated with the pastoral, the rural, the bucolic and the idyllic. Allen Guttmann sees the gestalt of pastoralism as one that includes open space, grass, warm weather and the bright sun.50 There is also the implication of ‘freedom’ being attached to the game played by the boys of summer. However, in passing, it may be worth noting that many of the protagonists of post-war Jewish fiction are temperamentally urban. ‘Typically’, writes David Brauner, ‘the fictional Jew is ignorant of, and at the same time has an instinctive aversion to, Nature in all its guises, particularly insofar as it symbolises rural life.’51 Brauner terms this a Jewish anti-pastoral, an attitude that has ramifications for some of Roth’s characters examined later in this chapter. The origin of baseball was, for many years, associated with a ‘cow pasture’ in Cooperstown in rural upstate New York. This source of the sport was propagated by the entrepreneur Albert Goodwill Spalding, whose ‘commission’ came up with the ‘fact’ that baseball’s origin should be attributed to Abner Doubleday who organised the first game in 1837. However, it is now recognised that the first baseball games were played in New York City in the 1840s.52 Nevertheless, the sport has stubbornly continued to carry connotations of the pastoral and the ‘village’ of Cooperstown (a Baudrillardian simulacrum) continues to cash in on the myth so, perhaps, it is not yet totally demythologised: nor is baseball fiction and the writing of sport per se. Michael Oriard regards one of the principal examples of the baseball landscape as a ‘pastoral moment in the midst of a crushing or anxiety-producing reality’ – a sort of ‘oasis of play’.53 A. Bartlett Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar and exPresident of Yale University who served briefly as the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, eulogises the baseball field in his Take Time for Paradise, thus: after we ascend a ramp or go through the tunnel and enter the inner core of the little city, we are often struck, at least I am, by the suddenness and fullness of the vision there presented: a green expanse, complete and coherent, shimmering, carefully tended, a garden [...].54 Consider also Roth’s description of Portnoy’s perception of the baseball field of his boyhood: Just standing nice and calm – nothing trembling, everything serene – standing there in the sunshine (as though the middle of an empty field, or passing the time on a street corner), standing without a care in the world in the sunshine.55 Here, Portnoy contradicts the Jewish anti-pastoral stereotype. However, Roth’s writing is full of irony and for Portnoy, the baseball field was the antithesis of his home: it is not a permanent release from the urban.

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Roth’s irony is more radical in the way Ulysses S. Fairsmith, his creation found in The Great American Novel, provides an extreme version, a Rothian lampoon, of the baseball field as pastoral. Fairsmith felt God’s presence in every park around the league, on those golden days of sweet, cheerful spring, hot plenteous summers, and bountiful and benevolent autumn, when physically strong and morally sound young do sport in seriousness beneath the sun [...]. Daytime baseball is nothing less than a reminder of Eden in the time of innocence and joy; and too, an intimation of that which is yet to come. For what is a ball park, but that place where Americans may gather to worship the beauty of God’s earth [...]56 Denying the pastoral The pastoral myth has been widely critiqued as a romantic fiction. As early as 1868 Henry Chadwick, in his The Game of Baseball, saw its ‘status as a scientific enterprise’57 and Mark Twain recognised that ‘baseball is the very symbol [...] the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, teeming 19th century’, rather than the rustic idyll.58 In later decades baseball became increasingly recognised as highly scientific rather than pleasurably aesthetic. It is, after all, a world of quantification and geometry; it is professional and a business. As Bill Brown notes, the sports page ‘resembles nothing so much as the business page in its incessant presentation of statistics’ and it is ‘baseball’s statisticity, rather than its pastorality, [that] may make the game seem timeless, and timelessly American’. And the players, like workers in the factory, become ‘objects of statistical knowledge’.59 Higgs notes that sports ‘point not toward an undifferentiated world of green pastures but toward a heavenly city where the winners walk on streets of gold’.60 However, it has been suggested by Stephen Gelber that ‘the game’s attraction lay in its congruence with everyday life [and] baseball provided the male business worker with a leisure analog to his job [...]. He was working at playing, and by doing so he was minimising dissonance between those two aspects of his life’.61 Ben Siegel takes the pastoral myth further: Releasing in the American mind an image-rich pastoral of blue skies and sunlit grass, of escape from work, school, and inhibition, baseball offers time off for good behaviour. In fact, time, or rather its absence, is one of the game’s most significant elements: only baseball among the nation’s major team sports is not played against the clock. This open-ended quality adds to the sport a ‘metaphysical’ dimension that helps lock its heroes into a seamless, mythic past.62 But more significant, perhaps, is the stance taken by those who see the mythical representation of baseball pastoral as ‘insidious’, baseball being used as a ‘sentimental trope’ in the ‘decades of McCarthyism, civil rights struggle and reaction,

Philip Roth 121 increasing Vietnam involvement, the Cold War, and the politics of assassination’.63 David C. Dougherty notes that sentimentality is reflected in fictional works in which ‘adversity propels human beings towards meaningful collective effort’.64 However, the baseball trope is developed in a quite different way as a political trope and is represented by the work of Philip Roth. Notably it was in The Great American Novel that Roth shows that ‘baseball [is] a means to dramatize the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate’.65 As Marshall Berman has pointed out, an ‘important quality of pastoral vision is that it leaves out dirty work’ and ‘sanitizes the hard realities of life’.66 The sports hero The characteristics of fictional sports heroes have been well described in Michael Oriard’s Dreaming of Heroes and Jack Higgs’s Laurel and Thorn and need little elaboration here.67 Oriard states: He is always handsome, generally medium in size, and in all ways manly. He is a good student, although not a brilliant one, and never a ‘greasy grind’ (horrors!) unless he has a pressing reason [...]. He is industrious, persistent, honest, brave, steady, generous, self-sacrificing, and serious to the point of humorlessness. He is fair, always modest, committed to his duty, and loyal to his friends, team, and school. He is democratic – he recognises the worth of others and the importance of the team – plays fairly with good sportsmanship, and is a gentleman around females. He is no ‘squealer’, maintaining silence even when he is wrongly accused, he endures pain uncomplainingly, and he will fight (always victoriously) only if seriously provoked, to defend someone else, or for honor.68 Though modelled on juvenile sports fiction it almost seamlessly merges into the professional sports arena, assisted by the writing of (for example) John R. Tunis.69 Oriard’s ‘model’, outlined above, is more normative than positive and, of course, not all fictional sports heroes follow this model. Nevertheless, Oriard reminds us that the ‘ideal is occasionally embodied popularly in real athletes’.70 Consider the way Roth paints the picture of a sports hero – Seymour Levov, tragically described in American Pastoral by its narrator, ‘Skip’ Zuckerman. Seymour Irving ‘Swede’ Levov is an assimilated Jew, who (unlike Hank Greenberg) didn’t ‘look Jewish’. Swede is known by a Nordic moniker because he possesses blond hair and fair skin. He is a ‘nice Jewish boy’71 (rather than a ‘Jew Boy’) from downtown Newark – who married Dawn, a Roman Catholic and former Miss New Jersey beauty queen. As a boy Swede was brought up on the books by Tunis, notably The Kid from Tomkinsville.72 Swede’s heroism derives from his outstanding career as a star high school athlete, exceptional in basketball, football, baseball, and the perception that he is an ideal human. After Weequahic High School he joined the Marine Corps where he became a

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‘recreation specialist’. He organised calisthenic drills for his battalion, ‘and the bulk of the time played for the base team against armed forces teams throughout the south, basketball all winter long, baseball all summer long’.73 Sport immersed him. Had he not made the decision to work with his father at the latter’s glove factory, he would have surely have been recruited by the New York Giants. As a teenager, Swede addressed the book’s narrator, Zuckerman, by his nickname, ‘Skip’, in the presence of a group of other boys. Zuckerman recalls how he felt having received public recognition from a sporting god. He recognised that for a star, a hero, life came easily. Swede had: the manly generosity, the princely graciousness, the athlete’s self-pleasure so abundant that a portion can be freely given to the crowd – this munificence not only overwhelmed me and wafted through me because it had come wrapped in my nickname but became fixed in my mind as an embodiment of something grander even than his talent for sports: the talent for ‘being himself’, the capacity to be this strange engulfing force and yet to have a voice and a smile unsullied by even a flicker of superiority – the natural modesty of someone for whom there were no obstacles, who appeared never to have to struggle to clear a space for himself.74 Levov fits Oriard’s model rather well and I will return to Swede, and his downfall, shortly. Denying the heroic: Coleman Silk and Swede Levov The American ‘athlete-hero’ (along with the ‘sporting pastoral’) became demythologised in the 1950s and 1960s when anti-heroism – indeed, anti-sport – became a recognisable trend in the American (and British) writing of sport. In this section I want to explore a few of the sports heroes whose fall Roth chronicles. In his book The Human Stain, the main character is Coleman Silk, a ‘black’ who could pass for a ‘white’. Like many of Roth’s personae Coleman (coal man) came from Newark and was a high school hero in track and field. He was a good sprinter and a local champion in the hurdles. As a teenager he added boxing to his sporting interests, to the distaste of his parents: ‘Track is so much more civilized than boxing, so much more like you’, said his mother. The Silk children were not taken to boxing bouts but to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other high cultural amenities.75 However, unknown to his parents, Coleman persisted with pugilism and intensified his training under the eye of Doc Chizner, his coach. At this stage in the book Roth alerts us to a couple of negativities of sport. Building up his endurance for fights meant staying on at the Newark Boys Club after other boys had gone home. Even more training was needed in the early hours of the morning:

Philip Roth 123 Doc had Coleman up and out doing his roadwork and his shadowboxing [...] out there at 5 A.M. in his grey hooded sweatshirt, in the cold, the snow, it made no difference, out there three and a half hours before the first school bell. No one else around, nobody running, long before anybody knew what running was, doing three quick miles, and throwing punches the whole way [...]. He hated the boredom of running – and he never missed a day.76 Coleman had internalised the ideology of serious sport. He had committed himself to boredom. Roth further refers us to the negative side of American sport when Doc Chizner takes Coleman to the University of Pittsburgh where he was acting as a referee at a boxing match between the university and the army. Doc wanted the university’s boxing coach to look at his protégé but before meeting him he alerts Coleman to the fact that he should tell the coach that he is Jewish, not ‘black’, in order to avoid discrimination. Doc knew the Pittsburgh coach and reckoned that Coleman could get a four-year boxing scholarship, a better deal than he would have obtained for track and field – and all he would have to do was box (i.e. ‘work’) for the university team (at a dangerous ‘job’). A fight was arranged with a college boxer, a couple of years older than him, but Coleman easily defeated him. On the way back to Newark Doc told him that he was a quick and strong fighter and added, ‘That was the best hook you ever threw, Silky. My boy, you were too strong for him.’ But, asks Roth, ‘Was he? Truly strong?’77 What did Roth mean by strong? Coleman Silk may have been physically strong but as the book proceeds the reader discovers that the high school hero is, in many ways, weak. He is not what he seems. The high school sports hero turns out to be a rather nasty piece of goods. Following his amateur boxing career he had four pro fights, winning each and then retiring. In his final fight he refused to prolong the bout intended to give the fans value for money. He beat his black opponent in the first round, commenting to the promoter that he finished the fight early ‘Because I don’t carry no nigger’.78 His moral strength was beginning to give way. Shechner notes that the mask (that started for Coleman in the world of sports) was ‘already being fitted for size; the dishonesty is becoming routine; the illness is in the blood stream, and obeys the rule laid down by Doc Chizner: “If nothing comes up, you don’t bring it up”.’79 His lying, hypocrisy and selfdeception went further: having passed for a white he decided to retain his forged identity as a Jew for the rest of his life. I am reminded of the words of Yi-Fu Tuan: What does it mean to know well another person? How long does it take? Must people have grown up together, or worked together for years. Must they have endured hardships together? We would like to know because if time is crucial to intimacy then an open society of large and diffuse membership in which encounters are brief can foster only superficial interpersonal knowledge.80

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The same can apply, of course, to the historian, the biographer and the ethnographer, each of who need to ‘know’ the person they are representing. So, how can we come to know a sports person? Can we ever know the real sportsman? Should we idolise (and idealise) athletes? How do we write a human being? Are athletes any better people than you and me? These are the kind of questions Roth plants in my mind. The sports hero, a pervasive figure in sporting literature, is often treated ironically and satirically. A number are featured in several of Roth’s works. The demythologising of the sports hero can be illustrated by the later life of Coleman Silk. In brief, the teenage boxing star is ultimately found to be a liar to his family. First, he boxed in secret because his father deplored it as an activity solely for the working classes. At the boxing trial he passes as a Jew – a white Jew. Subsequently he hid his blackness from his family and broke his mother’s heart by cutting her out of his life; somehow he kept his secret from his children who were brought up as Jews. In short, Silk, the high school sports hero, turns into a selfish, cruel, self-hating racist. The word ‘passing’, suggests Shechner, ‘carries with it a moral implication of illegitimacy and deviousness, even selling out’.81 Ross Posnock notes that ‘passing’ is an example of self-imposed purification, a subjection of the core self to a disciplinary project of control and subtlety. These very qualities helped make ‘Silky’ Silk an excellent college boxer. The art of boxing in fact becomes his model for passing, for they both require a slipperiness and poise that affords him the pleasure of being ‘counterconfessional’ in the same way he enjoys being a ‘counterpuncher’.82 In other words, boxing forms a central (if often unmentioned) theme running throughout the book in which ‘Silky’ becomes Silk through the jointly appropriate metaphors of ‘crafty, graceful movement’, ‘slipping a punch’ and ‘rolling’ with it being transferred from the ring to ‘his smooth and seamless transition from black to white’.83 Indeed, boxing and Silk’s later ‘games’ supply a new take on homo ludens.

Basketball was never like this Could Zuckerman, the narrator, the storyteller, ever really know Silk? And did he ever know Swede whom, I have noted, he also painted as a local hero? In the ironically titled American Pastoral he notes that, in trying to write Swede’s life history he does ‘not know the real Swede, if such a thing can be said to exist’ and accepts that he is in danger of misreading him.84 Indeed, for the rest of the book Zuckerman comes to recognise that his ‘childlike naivety’ had created a ‘filter through which he has seen the Swede’ and that it is ‘only in the shedding of this limited perspective’ that he could possibly depict him in a more realistic way.85 Through this new lens, the sports hero becomes more like an ordinary person; indeed, he is a tragic figure. The narrative focuses on ‘the Swede’s pastoral’, his dream beyond the city, beyond the suburbs, in the exurbs, his domestic idyll in the upstate rurality (read sentimentality) of Arcady Hill Road in Old Rimrock.

Philip Roth 125 Swede ‘envisions the American pastoral as an embodiment of an ideal, a nostalgic yearning for a rural origin where one can recover an Edenic oneness’,86 an opposition to the widespread notion of a ‘Jewish anti-pastoral’. But his notion of linear history, one of fluent, upward progress (from downtown Newark to Old Rimrock) explodes as he is removed from his ‘longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral – into the indigenous American berserk’.87 He becomes a self-perceived failure as a father who simply cannot work out what has gone wrong and how his daughter has turned against his liberal views. The worst thing that could have happened becomes reality. His dear daughter, brought up by the heroic sporting father and the beautyqueen mother, has the inappropriate name of Merry. As she reaches her teenage years she becomes miserable and angry, rejecting the happy, pretty little girl image and the idea of her being a reflection of her mother. From having ballet and tennis lessons and being ‘a leader in team sports, particularly kickball’, she becomes ungainly and fat, ‘a large, loping slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall’,88 not the sylph, sleek, athletic, proportioned girl that her athlete father and beautyqueen mother might have wished for her. She was not even an ‘ordinary’ girl with whom they would have been content. She learns to hate the capitalist system and to loathe the US military. Worse, she becomes a recluse, a loner, a fanatical terrorist and a teenage guerrilla. Incredibly she becomes a murderer, blowing up the local post office (as part of her anti-government sentiments) and in so doing killing a local doctor. Following three more murders she transforms herself into the exact opposite of the violent activist and becomes a remorseful member of an extreme Jain movement that opposes any violence against everything, including ‘nature’ in its broadest possible sense. This leaves her sick, hungry, emaciated and unwashed – again the polarised opposite of the fit, clean and uniformed young sportswoman that her parents would have prayed for. Yes, this can happen to sports heroes: this is what can be ‘produced’ in the American pastoral: life is not happy ever after. In reminiscing about Merry’s behaviour the Swede evokes his life in sport: ‘Basketball’, he recalls, ‘was never like this’ and as Jeffrey Hill notes, ‘Sport represents the world that has been lost.’89 Basketball was orderly with its predictable geometries and spatial certainties, noted earlier in Alex Portnoy’s love of the security of the baseball field. Appropriate to Coleman and Levov, but as represented in The Great American Novel, the ideals of home, mother and apple pie are replaced by an undermining of the assumptions upon which the myth of the athlete is based. The American sports hero ‘is encouraged to dream of success as a hero, only to be brought up short and written out of history.’90 And Zuckerman could have read Swede’s life through a lens provided by the triumphs of The Kid from Tomkinsville that were always ‘rewarded with a punishing disappointment or a crushing accident’. For Zuckerman such rewards illustrated ‘the cruelty of life. The injustice of it all’.91 So did Tunis allow Zuckerman ‘to imagine the horrors lurking beneath the placid, virtually perfect surface of Swede Levov’s life?’92 Who knows the influences involved in writing a human life?

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Finishing lines The lines in the sports arena are signs of limits. Swede accepted both the spatial limits of the sports field and the social limits of civic (urban) behaviour. He appeared to be a reasonable person and as Jerry, his brother, told him, he was ‘the boy who never broke the code, the one who does everything right’. Jerry Levov continued, ‘you won the trophy. You always make the right move.’ The Swede wanted to be ‘a real American jock’.93 He got more trophies too, or that’s how he treated them, loving his wife and daughter as ‘things’.94 Asking Merry if she knew what the limits were for going out at night she replied, ‘Limits. That’s all you think about. Not going to the extreme.’95 Swede also acquired from sport the habit of planning, to operate a game plan and to plan his training. He was always planning, ‘[a]lways trying to figure out the most reasonable course’, Merry told him.96 The acquisition of trophies is the stuff of sports. So too are limits and plans: in sport they are not to be transgressed; transgression is against the rules and perpetrators are spoilsports. For Merry, the ultimate transgressor, her father and his conservatism, is a reflection of the ‘normality’ of his sporting background. The only limits that Swede transgressed were his marriage to a shiksa and his passing from urban to pastoral, contradicting the anti-pastoralism of the Jewish stereotype. Drawing on Eileen Cohen’s comments, just as Alice looks for rules of propriety and patience in Wonderland and as Alex Portnoy is tied to the standards that his Jewish mother imposes,97 so Swede Levov is constrained by the rules of ‘fair play’. Like Alice, he applies the logic of above ground when Merry goes underground: ‘Both characters must wander through their nightmare visions to discover who they are.’98 So, did Swede’s sporting background and his heroic status have anything to do with Merry’s decline into despair? Had he forgotten ‘the way things actually work and [made] an athletic performance the repository of all [his] hopes’?99 Three ‘key American symbolic markers’ defined his vision: industrial capitalism, the ritual of sports and the purchase of a house. The ballpark, he said, was a place he wanted to be from the time he started kindergarten (as were the factory and the home). Sport then, supplies Swede with one of the major visible signs of an American identity.100 But to identify with the USA was anathema to Merry whose school friends called her Ho Chi Levov. Merry loathed and rejected the very American narratives that defined her father’s mindset. Or was she some kind of genetic abnormality or a self-creation? How did a ‘decorous and cheerful home’ produce a monster?101 Here, suggests Shechner, we have to look beyond Swede and Dawn and consider Lou Levov, the Swede’s father, and his brother Jerry. The placid, ordered, routine-driven life of the high school athlete contrasts drastically with the fulminations of Lou and the intemperance of Jerry. So, suggests Shechner, ‘the line of fanaticism runs straight from grandfather to granddaughter, skipping only Swede’. Hence, it is Swede who is singled out as the anomaly. Here Shechner implies that the social control provided by Swede’s early life in sport might have something to do with it:

Philip Roth 127 Maybe the baseball bleached it all out of him, having to learn patience and balance in waiting for his pitch. It takes focus and patience and your weight slightly back on the rear foot to hit the slider down and away.102 Shechner is here suggesting that the culture of elite sports – deferred gratification, self-control and fair play – internalised from an early age, provided a form of social control that Swede’s daughter, father and brother (each a non-sportsperson) lacked. Or was it chaos and unprogrammable from start to finish? It so happens that early in American Pastoral Zuckerman records that he met Swede, now with three sons and a second wife whom he had married some years after the disasters of Dawn and Merry. Where did they happen to meet? At Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets where they were playing the Astros. Swede had clearly not jettisoned his love of sport. Had he ‘rebuilt his fortification after all’?103 Here was a man with three sons, back at the green grass, the garden in the city (the ‘fortification’), built on baseball, and still unable to rid himself of the powerful pull of the perceived safety net of modern sports. ‘Silky’ Silk and ‘Swede’ Levov (having been high school stars) exemplify what Jack Higgs has recognised as Appolonian heroes, that is heroes who are unrealistic, immature (though giving the appearance of maturity) and who seek to conform to ‘some stereotyped conception of completeness’.104 But sport is no safety net, even for a sports hero.

A sports geography of the Patimkins I now want to explore more of Roth’s anti-sport sentiments and, at the same time, return to Roth the ethnographer. I do this by an exploration of the sportfocused sections of his first book Goodbye, Columbus and the novella of that title contained therein. Roth’s ethnographic skill can be clearly shown in his exploration of the sports culture of an outer suburb of Newark. The Patimkins are one of the families that live there and Roth, with ‘unforgiving detail’105 explores the world of sports to which I now turn. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner exemplified the way in which people can be assimilated into sports. Assimilation, co-option or transformation through sport is (as I have already shown) also a theme in Roth’s work but notably in Goodbye, Columbus in which he began his demythologising of American sports. He paints a lurid picture of life in the sports-mad household headed by Mr Ben Patimkin.106 Ridiculous pleasures and a ridiculous hero feature in the home of his nouveau riche, conservative, Jewish family that has made it and moved from the inner city of Newark to the kitsch-pastoral suburb, the promised land, of Short Hills (reminiscent of Swede’s Old Rimrock). This social and geographical mobility has been based on the wealth generated by Ben’s business, ‘Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks’. The book’s narrator is Neil Klugman (another of Roth’s alter egos) who was brought up by a stereotypical Jewish aunt in (of course) inner-city Newark.107

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Despite having studied philosophy (at the Newark Colleges of Rutgers University), Neil is an unambitious librarian whose girlfriend is Ben’s sporty daughter, the posh Radcliffe College-educated Brenda, an early example of the American Jewish princess. Neil’s first attempt to contact Brenda is by phone but the reply suggests the significance of sport in her life as he learns that she is out, practising golf. His first meeting with her was also in a sporting context: he held her glasses while she executed a stunning dive into the swimming pool. Her brother, Ron, a crew-cut local hero, basketball player and alumnus of one of the major American sport-oriented universities, Ohio State in Columbus, is represented as a negative stereotype of the American sportsman, described as a ‘college athlete with all the traits implied by the mindless world of the American “jock”’.108 Roth paints the Patimkins as ‘sympathetic fools by their obsession with sports’109 – serious sports at that. Brenda’s mother once had ‘the best back-hand in New Jersey [....] the best tennis player in the state, man or woman’,110 but now it is her children who are the dedicated athletes. Neil is pressured by Brenda to ‘learn to become a Patimkin’111 and by his own ambivalent desire for upward social mobility and his wish to court her. But while he is a ‘sharp-eyed critic’ of what she is up to he does not, at first, recognise what is happening to him.112 To join the Patimkin club it would be essential for him to adopt the mores of sport that would include joining a world of dedicated competitiveness. The move to the Short Hills pastoral from the Newark shtetl is matched by his passing from library books to sports field – from mind to body.113 In an early meeting with Neil, Brenda had complimented him on his ‘fine shoulders’ and asked if he was a sportsman, hinting at events to come. Straight lines During his summer at Short Hills Neil was able to make an informal social-geographical survey of the Patimkin milieu. Out of doors there is a nearby tennis court at Briarpath Hills and the inevitable swimming pool at the Green Lane Country Club. One evening Neil arranges to meet Brenda at the tennis court where she is playing against an acquaintance, Laura Simpson Stolowitch, known as ‘Simp’. Roth/Klugman describes Brenda’s deadly seriousness: Brenda was ahead five games to four, and her cocksureness about there being just one game remaining aroused enough anger in her opponent for the two of us to share. [...] Brenda finally won, though it took more games than she’d expected. The other girl [Simp] seemed happy to end it at six-all, but Brenda, shifting, running, up on her toes, would not stop [...] The darker it got the more savagely did Brenda rush to the net [...] [But] her passion for winning a point seemed outmatched by an even stronger passion for maintaining her beauty [...]. Later, Neil asked her why she rushed to the net only after dark. She said that she didn’t like to be too close unless she was sure Simp wouldn’t return the ball. This

Philip Roth 129 was because she’d had a nose job (‘a constructed part of the world of Jewish transformation’)114 and didn’t want it damaged by a return smash. ‘I was pretty’, she said, ‘Now I’m prettier.’115 Roth/Klugman notes that the tennis court was ‘bounded on all sides by white lines’116 and in describing the activity in the swimming pool he alludes to the straight ‘black lines that divided the pool into lanes for races’.117 Indeed, the linearity of sport, the prevalence of straight lines, is mentioned three times in seven pages of Goodbye, Columbus. Another reference to the swimming pool recalls its eight ‘long lines painted down the side of the pool’.118 The geometry of the rectangular design turns the pastoral into a geometer’s delight. As I observed earlier, these lines are vital in serious sports as they signify the formality, the orderliness, the predictability, the rule-boundedness and the segmentation of sporting practice.119 They are signs of territorialisation or spatial control and serve to establish that athletes know their places. It is a landscape of ‘the fast lane’, not one of ‘country roads’. Kerry Ahearn supplies an alternative reading of the lines, suggesting that they ‘form a boundary around Neil and Brenda Patimkin in their first pre-kiss sparring’.120 However, the enclosed space of the court can be read as a sacred space of sport that is transgressed by the lovers for their sexual tryst, similar to John Betjeman’s transgressions. Likewise, playfulness in the pool is not congruent with its designer’s intention of its use for serious sport with the separation of competitors by the marked lines. Neil and Brenda further transgress sport’s geometrical purity when they use the micro-geography of the swimming pool as a site for playfulness and frolic, bubbling ‘a kiss into each other’s lips’.121 Neil also uses the pool, not to train or race, but to voyeuristically gaze at Brenda’s breasts ‘like two pink-nosed fish and she let [him] hold them’.122 Ron, on the other hand, cannot relax and splash around and such is his competitive spirit that he has to race, constrained by the black lines.123 Neil refuses to compete against him, leaving him to simulate racing by ‘taking the length in sleek, immense strokes’.124 Neil gazes over the Patimkins’ lawn: it is strewn with ‘two irons, a golf ball, a tennis can, a baseball bat, basketball, a first-baseman’s glove, and what was apparently a riding crop’. At the edge of the family property was a basketball court – a white logo with O inscribed in the centre, referring to Ohio State University.125 Strewn about, ‘those expensive toys which are a sign of suburban leisure were a natural part of the Patimkin environment’.126 The clothing is sporty and Brenda wears Bermuda shorts, a white polo shirt, tennis sneakers and white socks. Neil has never been a serious sportsman; he works with books. Having resisted taking part in the race in the swimming pool he reinforces his lack of sporting skills when he reluctantly takes part in an informal basketball game, taking the place of Mr Patimkin. Neil had not played since high school and certainly didn’t take it seriously. The Patimkins, on the other hand, meticulously score the game to establish winners and losers. Neil shows his ineptitude by failing to catch a ball that bounced off his chest leading Brenda to ask, ‘Can’t you catch?’127 Having played a while Patimkin shouted ‘Shoot, you’re me.’ This puzzled Neil but it can be interpreted as having being assimilated into the Patimkins and into Patimkinism.

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Sport iconography and Ron’s record Inside the Patimkin residence is displayed a mass of sporting iconography. Photographs of the Patimkin offspring included a blown-up newspaper photo of Ron palming a basketball in one hand like a raisin; under the picture it said ‘Center, Ronald Patimkin, Milburn High School, 6’4”, 217 pounds’. And there was another picture of Brenda on a horse, and next to that, a velvet mounting board with ribbons and medals clipped to it: Essex County Horse Show 1949, Union County Horse Show 1950, Garden State fair 1952, Morristown Horse Show 1953, and so on.128 In focusing on sports, ‘Ron has substituted the masculine ideals of assimilated American life for [the] traditional Jewish values’ noted earlier129 and, as Allen Guttmann notes, ‘Beefy Ronald Patimkin is a type unrelated to the pale scholar of the shtetl’.130 Parental pride is, of course fuelled by their children’s sports success and few such parents regard pride as a sin. The extra seat at dinner is also sportised, being jokingly reserved for baseball star, Mickey Mantle every time the New York Yankees (of whom the Patimkins are fans131) win a doubleheader – ‘a sign of the corruption of a Jewish tradition but an indication of where modern Jews look for their messiah’.132 Conversation at the dinner table revolves entirely around sporting matters. Ron even introduces it to his future responsibilities. He and his future wife plan to have a boy ‘and when he’s about six months old I’m going to sit him down with a basketball in front of him, and a football, and a baseball, and then whichever he reaches for, that’s the one we’re going to concentrate on’.133 Neil’s next stop on this ethnographic tour was the bathroom. There he ‘could see Ron’s jock straps hanging out to dry on the hot and cold knobs of the shower. Nobody ever questioned their tastefulness as an adornment’.134 In his bedroom Ron would read Sports Illustrated and listen to his long-playing records. His banality was defined by his taste in music – that of Mantovani and André Kostelanetz. But Ron’s favourite was a record of another kind, the record of his time as a student–athlete at Ohio State, revealing the self-centred and self-seeking style of the rest of the family. Ron invited Neil to listen to the long-playing record. A roll of drums was followed by a marching song and bells and finally a voice, ‘bowel-deep and historic, the kind one associates with documentaries about the rise of Fascism’, announces: ‘The Year, 1956. The season, fall. The place, Ohio State University.’135, Roth takes over a page to present the record’s script. Basically it builds up to the homecoming game, 1956 – the opponent, ‘the ever dangerous Illini [...]’. Then it moves on to the Minnesota game and for seniors it will be their last game for the red and white [...] There’ll be a big hand of appreciation from this capacity crowd for some of the boys who won’t be back next year. Here comes Larry from Akron, Ohio [...]. And here comes Ron Patimkin dribbling out. Ron, Number 11, from Short Hills, New Jersey. Big Ron’s last game, and it’ll be some time before Buckeye fans forget him [...].

Philip Roth 131 And finally, We will choose husbands and wives, we shall choose jobs and homes, we shall sire children and grandchildren, but we will not forget you, Ohio State [...]. And to you, Ohio State, to you Columbus, we say thank you, thank you and goodbye.136 As Messenger puts it, this is a ‘burlesque of school sports sentiment’.137 This is ‘manufactured sentimentality on a recorded document’ about a skill that, for Ron, ‘has no permanent value in the money-making world’. He is simply another sad victim ‘sacrificed to the cult of adjustment [from college basketball] and security [a job with Patimkin’s Sinks]’.138 Neil leaves the room thinking, ‘My future brother-in-law’.139 In Roth’s writing of the traditional college hero, Ron Patimkin is presented as ‘a very funny School Sports Hero in a genre not generally known for comedy’.140 The choice of Ohio State University may be more significant than simply facilitating the use of the word ‘Columbus’. The university has long been famed for its ‘production’ of star athletes and has been more known for its football team than for its academic standards.141 It is a ‘sports university’ in extremis. As Ron’s record suggests, it was a great place to be for four years. Or was it? It was also the kind of university where the football coach would be better known than the university’s president or even the state governor. Jesse Owens was one of its many famous alumni but, as Bill Baker’s biography of him shows, he was attending a school that ‘majors in prejudice’.142 Woody Hayes, a former Ohio State football coach, was the sort of man who was constructed as a national hero when, in the 1970s, ‘he beats up a photographer on the sidelines, or when, after the My Lai massacre, he said that he wouldn’t trust any Vietnamese over 5’.143 In a game against Clemson University, Hayes ran on to the field and assaulted a Clemson player (who had made an important interception). The next day Hayes was fired. The athletic department at OSU has had its fair share of corruption suggesting that it may not be such a nice place after all. Another member of the sports-mad Patimkin family is Brenda’s younger sister, Julie. She is the sort of girl who, ‘before dinner, while the other little girls on the street had been playing with jacks and boys and each other, had been on the back lawn putting golf balls with her father’.144 Neil first encounters her at the aforementioned basketball game. She presents herself as a spoiled brat, being indulged and allowed to take extra shots and get free throws. As the game proceeded Neil becomes increasingly serious, especially when Julie is involved. His feeling towards sports seems to change. Now he ‘wanted to win, to run little Julie into the ground’. He played to win which meant that he was becoming sportised – but in the most cynical of ways. He succumbed to the Patimkin indulgence of their child and let her win. ‘Even Ron lets her win’, said Brenda. So Julie is used to winning and a mishap on her part is usually followed by an excuse to nullify her performance, such as ‘I hurt my finger yesterday and it just hurt when I served’ and tantrums when defeated at ping-pong.145 Such behaviour is frequently found

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in sports. But her outbursts led Neil to further internalise the ideology of sport. He sought revenge and played ping-pong against Julie, this time without the presence of the senior Patimkins. He had further assimilated the Patimkinian sport ideology: ‘I began to win and I liked it.’ Julie stormed out of the room and failed to complete the game when realising that she couldn’t win.146 I can imagine the Schadenfreude that Neil felt following the little girl’s defeat. On track Brenda asks Neil, ‘Do you ever run?’ His answer is that he ran a mile each month at high school. She gets him to agree to run and they turn up at the quarter-mile track at the nearby high school. They ‘were dressed similarly, sneakers, sweat socks, khaki Bermudas, and sweat shirts’ but was the similarity of dress accidental? He felt sure that he ‘was somehow beginning to dress the way she wanted’ him to – like a sportsperson.147 He was being assimilated into the Patimkins and subtly inducted into sportsworld – the ‘right thing to do’ in the milieu of the upper middle classes. As far as Brenda was concerned there was no question of merely jogging around together. ‘Let’s see who’s faster’, she said, and then they started along the accurately measured track. This was racing, not running. They ran the first lap together but as they approached the half-mile mark Brenda swerved off the track and tumbled down on to the grass infield. ‘“Hey Bob Mathias”, she called, “let’s lie down in the sun [...]”.’148 Neil continued running and completed a third lap. He had outrun her but she wanted more: ‘You’re good’, she said. My hands were on my hips and I was looking at the ground and sucking air [...]. I didn’t have much to say about it. ‘Uh-huh,’ I breathed. ‘Let’s do this every morning,’ she said. ‘We’ll get up and have two grapefruit, and then you’ll come out here and run. I’ll time you. In two weeks you’ll break four minutes, won’t you sweetie? I’ll get Ron’s stop watch.’149 It is unlikely that Neil recognised the irony in the allusions to Bob Mathias (the two-time Olympic decathlon champion) or to the four-minute mile (he was not that good!) and compared with Brenda he remained a sporting ignoramus. While at the track they witnessed another athlete training for a field event. Neil described him as ‘flinging a shot put as far as he could’.150 To ‘fling’ a shot is a term nobody with an inkling of track and field athletics would use. It is the equivalent of ‘throwing a ball throw’, a meaningless term. A discus is flung (thrown) but a shot is put. It has been suggested that Neil’s improper description of shot-putting is Roth’s way of signifying that Neil was still a sporting dimwit – ‘a hopeless schlemiel, forever out of place in the Patimkin world’.151 The next day Neil’s legs were sore but Brenda got him to do exercises. Neil still did his running but he only covered half a mile. Brenda watched him with stopwatch in hand. As he passed the quarter-mile mark Brenda shouted out ‘A minute and fourteen seconds’, as they do in serious track racing. Lap times are

Philip Roth 133 important in order to maintain even pace, the optimal (scientific) way of doing such things. There was no tape to break but he ‘had Brenda’s sweet flesh to meet’ him and, for the first time, she told him that she loved him. Surely she loved him, in part because he was becoming a sportsman in the modern, rationalist mode. He was becoming a Patimkin. Like Coleman Silk he now ran every day of the week. This was a planned training programme yet it was only recently that he had said to Brenda, free spiritedly, ‘I haven’t planned a thing in three years.’152 During their talks at the track Neil and Brenda mentioned the four-minute mile, track running, the measured distance, lap times, stopwatches and personal records: all elements of serious sport. By the end of the week Brenda clocked him at 7 minutes 2 seconds for the mile. This was an extremely modest result but neither Brenda nor Neil commented on its quality. Neil, at least, would probably not have known what a ‘good’ result was. What seems to have been important was that it was recorded by the power of the stopwatch. It was a quantified record, a target to improve upon. Neil was in the process of locking himself into the ‘prison of measured time’.153 Ben Patimkin’s dubious dictum that hard work never killed anybody can be applied to both manual labour and athletic training. And Neil’s daily training was becoming increasingly like the manual labour undertaken by the labourers at Patimkin’s sink factory. Neil’s running didn’t need to have been like this. Why use the 440-yard track every day that, according to Allen Guttmann, ‘may or may not symbolize the final futility of his efforts’?154 In a place named Briarpath Hills surely he could have run á la Charles Sorley? Or he could have simply reflected upon his situation. But perhaps that would mean too much freedom from Brenda. So when Neil had some spare time during his stay at the Patimkins he (almost automatically) went on to the lawn, not to philosophise or read a book but to shoot baskets, drive a cotton golf ball and kick a soccer ball.155 As Christian Messenger points out, ‘Neil is terrified by this life because he can envision himself paralyzed by grudge ping-pong matches, by the seductive branches of the sporting goods tree, and by dawn runs [...] on high school tracks.’156 Again, he was experiencing a gradual process of assimilation and sportisation that, for him, was seen as a form of paralysis. Brenda had made him more like her; he had been groomed in athletic ideology. He had become an insider. Roth comically exposed as juvenile the myth perpetuating the sports heroes of the American dream, exemplified in Ron’s long-playing record. The awe in which Ron and his ilk are held reveals the juvenile quality of serious sport and the infatuation with the sports hero. The Patimkin’s lifestyle, dominated by money and sports, is empty and meaningless. As Steven Milowitz puts it, the ‘Patimkin home thrives in its shallow triviality, its members concentrating on frivolous detail to distance themselves from a world harsh and unrelenting’.157 Neil recognises this. The relationship between Neil and Brenda disintegrated. As Jack Higgs puts it, ‘his parting message seems to be not only “Goodbye, Columbus” but also “farewell to sport”’.158 Although Neil turns out to be not all that bad at sports he now sees it as part of ‘the new Jewish world of American orthodoxy’ making him

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an alien among his ‘own people’.159 Perhaps Roth is here questioning the alleged bonding function so often attributed to sports – the way sport co-opts diverse groups into a social whole. In Goodbye, Columbus Roth makes fools of the sporty Patimkins, the shallowness of the sporting pastoral of the suburbs, the Patimkins’ anti-intellectualism and their insidious attempts to convert Neil Klugman to the world of sport. The novella also exemplifies the decline of the school sports hero. Ron, having graduated from a major university, finds work at his father’s sink company rather than as a physical education teacher and, despite having a degree, finds it impossible to unload one of his father’s trucks. Neil emerges as a sort of anti-hero, turning out to be not quite the sportsman that Brenda would have liked. And he would have preferred her to be ‘slightly not Brenda’. Higgs reads this as suggesting that ‘Brenda would probably have been less concerned with appearances and with exhibitionism, both of which are symptoms of the sporting disposition’.160

The Great American (sports) Novel There is little doubt that The Great American Novel is Roth’s ‘quirkiest fulllength work, and differs markedly in many important respects from almost anything else he has written’.161 It has also been read as ‘lackluster’ and one of his ‘most pronounced artistic failures’.162 It is possibly his least known book, especially outside North America. Indeed, most non-Americans would not understand it, given the emphasis on baseball and its nationally and regionally distinctive vocabulary. And a sizeable number of readers might be put off by the self-indulgence of the author and the book’s ‘vulgarity’. In my view, however, the book raises a number of fascinating questions about the ideology of elite sport and the problems of its representation – far too many to deal with here. In a review of The Great American Novel Ben Siegel noted that novelists have found that contemporary life is so baffling and unreal that they have felt the need to give freer and freer rein to their imaginations and rhetoric. Not surprisingly, therefore, these writers, in order to capture this society’s present confusions rely increasingly on fantasy and fable, on imaginative excess and adventurous form or technique; employing a style that tends to the ‘cool, farcical, zany and slapstick,’ they concentrate on the thinness of line between dream and reality, fancy and fact, comedy and pathos.163 Or, as Geoffrey Wolff put it, ‘in a [sports] world in which so much is disordered, like an insane murderous joke, how do you recognize what is funny? How does the artist authenticate his invention?’164 The attempt to wrestle with an American reality that seems to outstrip or even overwhelm the writer’s creative powers is (I think) brilliantly illustrated in The Great American Novel, a surreal work that inverts the traditional (mythical) qualities of the baseball hero, replacing the likes of Ron Patimkin, the teenaged

Philip Roth 135 Coleman Silk and young Swede Levov with a set of bizarre and useless antiheroes. At the same time, Roth melds this theme with a pungent critique of the sporting pastoral. We are reminded that ‘we live in a bizarre, cartoon world where the ludicrous and the calamitous coalesce; a world in which a tone of black humor keeps reappearing and we do not know whether to laugh or cry.’165 America is ‘not the great unsullied, and truthful country it has officially presented itself as’ and in The Great American Novel Roth deflates the USA and the myths surrounding its sports heroes.166 The book is intended as counter-history but one that is playful and funny, drawing on the playfulness of language, as in the works of James Joyce. In an interview with himself, Roth stated that the comedy in the book ‘exists for the sake of no higher value than comedy itself; the redeeming value is not social or cultural reform, or moral instruction, but comic inventiveness. Destructive, or lawless, playfulness – and for the fun of it.’167 He claims that it is not just a matter of demythologising baseball but of discovering in baseball a means to dramatize the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality [...] that will not give an inch in behalf of that idealized mythology.168 Roth metaphorically connects ‘baseball’s pastoral associations with those of the nation’.169 The Great American Novel is full of negativities and baseball ‘mythology reinforces the illusion that such negativities do not exist’ and Roth sets out to counter this illusion.170 There is, of course, comedy in Roth’s gentle satire on American sports life but comedy is given much freer rein in The Great American Novel. The book’s humour is ‘masculine, exuberant, vulgar, and full of sheer animal spirits’: it is ‘characterized by irreverence, profanity, physical discomfort, scatology and even obscenity’.171 It is a rambling work that has been described, on the one hand, as ‘a cruel and shameless comic extravaganza’172 and on the other as an ‘artistic pinnacle of sports fiction’173 and ‘Roth’s intertextual tour de force’.174 It has been read as ‘a mythic-satiric epic that ridicules conservative polities’ but at the same time a masterful portrayal of sports themselves.175 It is also, according to Oriard, the ‘ultimate expression’ of the ‘demythologising trend’ in American sports literature.176 The Great American Novel is said by some critics to be a book about baseball.177 Others see more in it than that: it can also be read as an ‘antiBaseball Novel’178 or one that desanctifies the ‘mythic words on which Roth’s generation was brought up – winning, patriotism, gamesmanship’.179 Such varied readings of the book further support the claim that is a postmodern novel.180 Satire is not the same as comedy. The former has a target whereas this is not necessary in the latter. As I showed above, the targets of much of Roth’s satire are the standard American institutions – the family, upward mobility, the suburbs, organised religion, sexual mores, conservatism and sports – and the way sports had ‘developed’ after the Second World War. While writers such as Roger Kahn (The Boys of Summer) sought ‘some enduring link to an obliterated past’, Roth ‘prefers to cut the ties that bind’.181

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Call me Smith Roth presents to his readers a book written by an octogenarian baseball fanatic called Word Smith – or ‘Smitty’. The book mixes ‘fact’ with ‘fiction’ so that incongruous juxtaposing (another characteristic of ‘postmodernism’) places real baseball heroes and well known politicians and celebrities against bizarre Rothian inventions and events which, when checked, are less inventions than he suggests. Indeed, Eric Solomon stresses that while Roth presents the readers with seemingly implausible characters and events, all have some basis in reality.182 This serves to ‘undermine our confidence in our ability to distinguish the truth from the whoppers’,183 raising the fundamental historical questions about what is a ‘fact’ and what is ‘truth’. Broadly speaking the book is Smith’s revisionist history of American baseball in the form of a great work of writing that would ‘constitute the “truth” about the national disease’.184 The reader should bear in mind, however, that his revision is a revision of the already revised history of US baseball. Smith, an ex-journalist, is confined to the Valhala Home for the Aged. He has been described as ‘a mess of aberrations – a sick, talky, vicious, dirty-minded, sadistic, racist, chauvinistic pig with a persecution complex and an aggravated case of paranoia’.185 His thesis is that those who govern baseball, or those in authority, have excised the clubs making up the Patriot League from the history of American sport because of the communist sympathies of many members of the teams. The powers-that-be distorted the ‘truth’ to suit themselves. They lied to the US public and they were driven by the profit motive. Smith’s aim is to catalogue the origins, personnel, matches and eventual demise of his own team, the Ruppert Mundys, and to have his work published in order to alert the great American public to ‘the truth’. On Friday January 21 1971 the aged Smith cast his vote for the great Luke Gofannon to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. Smith handed his vote personally to Mr Bowie Kuhn, the ‘so-called’ Commissioner of Baseball.186 When it comes to the list of players who received votes that day, Gofannon was not among them. Most votes were awarded to Yogi Berra.187 This is seen by Smith as irregular practice and reinforces his plan to document the corruption within baseball’s administration. This kind of writing unsettles the reader who may believe that Gofannon is as much a ‘real person’ as Kuhn and Berra. Thus, Roth presents the Mundys and the Patriot League in a sufficiently credible way to induce scholars and students to visit the library (or Google) to check if they ever existed.188 After all, good storytellers, ‘like all the best liars, made their most outrageous extravaganzas seem believable by peppering them with concrete details’.189 As Schwartz notes, Roth ‘uses the baseball context not only to question how we record history, but also to make us experience directly the uncertainty of our basic, commonplace assumptions about the nature of truth’.190 However, the book is also a sort of experiment into how far he can go with bawdy humour, comedy, irony and frivolity. ‘And what’, he asks, ‘could be more frivolous, in my own estimation, than writing a novel about sports?’ 191

Philip Roth 137 The naming of the team Ruppert is itself frivolous and ironic. Colonel Jacob Ruppert Jnr (1867–1939) was, for 24 years, an owner of the New York Yankees. It is felt by many that, through his wheeling and dealing, he was the most successful baseball executive ever, dragging the Yankees from mediocrity to a club that dominated baseball for much of the 1920s and 1930s. However, his links with sports were matched by his even stronger links with the alcohol industry. He inherited the Ruppert Brewery Company from his father and made it the leading brewery in the state of New York.192 Here, then, was a man who ran both a baseball team – the game of sunny summers and healthy American boys – and a brewing company that, soon after his chairmanship, was subject to prohibition on the grounds of endangering the nation’s health. A number of interpretive studies have already been written on aspects of The Great American Novel.193 In the sections that follow I explore aspects of the book that have hitherto been relatively overlooked, aspects which suggests that Roth is a major critic of modern sports. No sense of place: comedy, satire and the heroic Roth turns the world of baseball upon its head, not totally unlike the worlds of Lewis Carroll. The Ruppert Mundys and the Patriot League do not possess players in the heroic mould, good upstanding fellows that feature in many hagiographic novels and biographies. Instead, the team is a motley crew, made up of anti-heroic personnel. Word Smith introduces selected members of the 1943 Mundy team. It included fourteen-year-old ‘Nickname’ Damur who was ‘swift enough but hardly man enough, and if it were not for the wartime emergency, and the irresponsibility of the Mundy brothers he would have been at home where he belonged, with his long division and his mom’. Then there was John Baal who ‘joined the club after serving two years on a five-year gambling rap – he’d shot craps after the World Series with the rookie of the year, and wiped the boy out with a pair of loaded dice’. There was also Wayne Heket who had been a rookie in 1909 and was the oldest player in the major leagues. The team also fielded Hot Ptah, a one-legged player who cursed and insulted other players in order to put them off their stroke. One batter reported that he said a ‘lot of unkind words about my mother bein’ intimate with niggers down in the south’.194 Roth named some of his players after ancient gods but there is ‘a grotesque comic disparity between superhuman promise inherent in those names and the actual overwhelming ineptitude of the characters’.195 They had ‘a left handed dwarf’ named O. K. Ockatur, a player who couldn’t stop running into the stadium wall, and the one-armed Bud Parusha. This dishevelled crew hardly match the characteristics of the sports hero and are ‘the most unprofessional, undignified, immoral, athletes [...] ever gathered together on a playing field’.196 These are Merriwell’s men turned inside out and the book has been called ‘a hilarious desecration of every statue in the baseball pantheon’.197 As Robert Lewis noted, ‘Roth’s picture of virtually helpless and infirm players runs counter to the usual conception of youth and vigor conveyed by athletes’ and The Great American Novel denies its ball players ‘the heroic status that myth often confers’.198

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Nor do the Mundys have a beloved, idyllic home field. That was appropriated by the army for use as an embarkation camp and the owners cashed in on the deal. As a result the Mundys were permanently on the road. Their ‘home turf’ was denied them but for many of the clubs in the Patriot League their home fields were hardly pastoral idylls. Consider, for example, Word Smith’s description of Butcher Field, the stadium occupied by the Aceldama Butchers: Now because of the proximity of ‘the hog factory’ to the ball park, playing against the Butchers in the Pork capital of the World [I can imagine the welcoming sign at the city limits] had never been considered a particularly savoury experience by Patriot League players, and it was a long standing joke among them that they would rather be home cleaning out cesspools for a living than have to call Aceldema their home on a sultry August day. [...] Visiting rookies would invariably give a start at the noise that came from a pig having his throat slit just the other side of the left-field wall, and when a thousand of the terrified beasts started screaming at the same time, it was not unheard of for a youngster in pursuit of a fly ball to fall cowering to his knees.199 So much for the boys of summer in the Elysian field, playing ball with their fathers. This is but one example of how Roth creates an ‘outrageous countermythology’ of the pastoral ‘and exposes its many gaps and fissures’.200 But how unreal is this description? Could there be any ‘truth’ in it? Butcher Field gives the impression of having been modelled on Roth’s beloved Ruppert Stadium in Newark which was located near a garbage site and ‘some games had to be delayed because of the horrible smell and smoke from the dump’.201 How ‘untruthful’, then, was Butcher Field? How ‘untruthful’ was the one-armed outfielder and the midget, the likes of whom have actually played in major league baseball?202 As Schwartz observes, Roth uses an ‘anti-tall-tale’ technique ‘by which he makes the real seem fictional’.203 I noted earlier the role of sport in social bonding. Smith observed that it was baseball that ‘makes kin of competitors, makes neighbours of strangers, makes friends of enemies, if only while the game is going on?’204 Similarly, note brainy Isaac Ellis’s response to his father, Abraham Ellis, the owner of another Patriot League team, the Tri-City Greenbacks, who observed that, ‘“for a Jewish pois’n dis is de greatest country that ever vas, in de history of the voild!” “Sure it is dad”, said his contemptuous son, “as long as he plays the game their way”’.205 The italicised caveats serve to subvert commonly accepted clichés about the ‘great American game’ by questioning both the bonding and assimilation functions of baseball and exposing underlying power relationships.206 Play, sport and baseball: godless science and sterile statistics Early in the book Smith implicitly alludes to the distinction between play and sport, engaging in a light-hearted way with the philosophy of sport by introducing the different configurations of a body-cultural practice. A digression in his

Philip Roth 139 ‘Prologue’ leads Smith to the ribaldry of Geoffrey Chaucer, who he had encountered as a student at Valhala High and he doesn’t take long to refer to the enjoyment that young boys find from farting. ‘The great thing’ about flatulence was that it could be done simply for fun as a sort of folk-game. Nostalgically Smith records how ‘we could fart for hours when we were boys! [...] and be perfectly content. [...] Best thing you could do it to yourself too. Yessir, boy knew how to make use of his leisure time in those days’.207 Smith recognises that such a body-cultural practice was basically folk-like and playful but could be sportised. According to Allen Guttmann, one of the essential elements of sport (as opposed to play) is that of quantification. Playful running is not measured and recorded but sportised running includes qualities such as measurement, specialisation and the quest for records.208 Farting too could be sportised – ‘Sure, you can make it into a game and give points. So much for a wet fart, so much for a series, and so on. And penalties if you draw mud, as we called it in those days.’209 Eventually, he speculated, ‘some scoundrel will be selling artificial farts. [...] Like everything artificial’.210 Sports also contain recognised rules and regulations, something that is missing in playfulness that does not have bureaucracies to ‘recognise’ them. Roth’s naughty uses of scatology serves to ‘pollute the atmosphere of Smith’s never-never land’ of the sporting pastoral.211 Roth proceeds to mock the myth of the naturalness and playfulness of baseball and accepts its ‘patent artificiality’.212 The great importance of rules and regulations was recognised by General Douglas D. Oakhart, the President of the Patriot League. Baseball, like other sports, needs standardised spaces, subject to precise measurements that have a strong degree of permanence in order to make competition and records meaningful. In other words, sports are intrinsically conservative. Oakhart voices such conservatism in his annual lecture to the children of Massachusetts who come to the League’s headquarters to hear his speech on the national pastime. Central to his lecture are the spatial dimensions of the field of play. He pronounced to the children that: if the distance between the bases were to be shortened by as little as one inch, you might as well change the name of the game, for by so doing you would have altered fundamentally the existing relationship between the diamond ‘as we have always known it’ and the physical effort and skill required to play the game upon a field of those dimensions. [...] I am only telling you that ninety feet is how far from one another the bases have been for a hundred years now, and as far as I am concerned, how far from one another they shall remain until the end of time.213 Oakhart, no stranger to hyperbole, felt that the originator of baseball’s geometric dimensions ‘was a genius on a par with Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton’. He believed that ‘ninety feet was precisely the length necessary to make this game the hard, exciting suspenseful struggle that it is’ and to the visiting schoolchildren he added,

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Philip Roth If I have any advice to you today, it’s this – don’t try to shorten the base paths in order to reach home plate faster and score. All you will have accomplished by that technique is to cheapen the value of a run.214

The General later noted that ‘the beauty and meaning of baseball resided in the fixed geometry of the diamond and the test it provided of agility, strength and timing’.215 It was the sharply defined rules and the ultimate authority of the governing body (‘that someone, or something, is controlling our lives’)216 that had provided Alex Portney with a halcyon sense of order and unambiguously dictated life’s rights and wrongs.217 Note here the centrality of artifice, not of nature, and of prescribed geometries not pastoral geographies (Figure 7.1). In The Great American Novel ‘pastoral visions become paranoid fantasies’.218 And Roth/Smith acknowledge the prevalence and perversion of power within the ‘national pastime’. The conservative aversion to tampering with the geometry of sport is matched by a concern by some with interfering with sport’s physical environment. The characteristics that serve to define modern sport (quantification, rationalisation, scientism and record seeking) are ridiculed in The Great American Novel by the inclusion not only of lists of statistical data but also the statistical analyses made by Isaac Ellis. As a seven-year-old mathematics prodigy this ‘crazy little genius kid’ had a pedantic penchant for analysing baseball performances by using quantitative models of the optimal curve of the ball. He produced charts, graphs and formulae that proved that every other way of playing baseball was wrong. His conclusions were based on ‘the two fundamental theorems of the laws of chance, proposed by Pascal in the seventeenth century’.219 However, the presentation of his equation for winning a baseball game and other optimising formulae were neither riveting reading nor easy education for the players. The most fearsome formula that Isaac presented to a team of uneducated fools was: d=

L P V2 t2 gC2 7230 W

c

Isaac informed the Greenbacks’ players that: d equals displacement from a straight line; c L equals the circulation of the air generated by friction when the ball is spinning; P equals the air density; W equals the ball’s weight [...] and so on, and so on. The players were getting fed up with the scholarship. They told him that baseball was a game for men, not boys, but Isaac, the smart aleck, retorted, ‘If I may, it is a “game” for neither. It is an applied science and should be approached as such.’220 The players could only take so much. The discussion (or lecture) ended with a player’s retort: ‘F off Isaac! F-U-C-K off, if you know what that equals!’221

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Figure 7.1 Baseball pastoral? (National League of Professional Baseball Clubs)

Roth here mocks the scientism of sport, ‘subjecting the entire canon of baseball records to statistical analysis’.222 And the transformation of ‘the game of summer’ to a mathematical theorem is the polar opposite of the pastoral. The ludicrous application of formulae reveals the extent to which science has become the very essence of sport. But are the formulae fact or fiction? The joke is on the reader because the formulae that Roth quotes come from actual academic books published by MIT Press and by Simon and Schuster, works he had encountered on his visit to the

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library at the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown where he undertook research for the book.223 The facts fit perfectly into the bizarre world of Roth’s fiction. He could not have ‘set out to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting’, and in the critiquing sports.224 The Mundys’ manager, a fanatical Christian called Ulysses S. Fairsmith, also attacked the various applications of ‘godless science’ that he believed would take over (what he thought was) the nature of sports. His attack was provoked by the introduction of night-time baseball to the Patriot League schedule, at the stadium of the Kakoola Reapers. Science was interfering with nature. The pastoral – if there ever was one – was becoming artificialised. He pronounced: ‘It is not by the faint wattage of the electric light bulb that ye shall be judged, but rather in the unblinking eye of the Lord.’225 What next? Baseball on radio? Plastic fields? Indoor arenas? General Oakhart opposed what he perceived as pretence and was infuriated that people would sit in their cars, or at home, listening to a broadcaster describing a game taking place many miles away. Smith, reporting Oakhart’s views, noted that ‘the game might as well not be happening, for all they knew! The whole thing might even be a hoax, a joke’ with added sound effects and the employment of actors.226 He likened broadcast baseball to a ‘live’ broadcast of autumn by an announcer in the woods: ‘Well, now folks, the maples are turning to red [...]. Would no one of sanity and integrity survive to carry on the great traditions of the League?’227 The central importance of ‘being there’, the privileging of the visual, and the nostalgic experience of a sport’s place are all conservative attitudes that Roth implicitly critiques. As it happens, however, the very debates initiated by Fairsmith and Oakhart have been promoted by postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, each of whom have suggested that the future lies in the total televisualisation of sport and the elimination of spectators from the grandstands and bleachers.228 And there is a contradiction in Fairsmith’s conservative views of baseball, space and place. While accepting the rigid, imposed spatialisation of the baseball diamond with its precisely measured segments and lines, he rejects other scientific applications designed to ‘improve’ sport through various processes of artificialisation. The purpose of science in sport is to improve performance that produces a winning team. Isaac Ellis, now seventeen years old, has a laboratory under the stadium. His interest in statistics has shifted to nutrition and he has started promoting his latest scientific miracle product – ‘Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions’. These may have the flavour of other breakfast cereals and they’re packed in the same box but unlike other similar products these ‘do the job’. Isaac adds that they produce ‘extra energy’ and if ‘the Mundys will eat my Wheaties, [...] they will win all of their remaining games! And by betting on them I will win a quarter of a million dollars.’229 Roth is here not only focusing on the greed that is widespread in sport but also the notion of ‘unfair aids’ such as ‘supplements’ and doping (i.e. Isaac’s Wheaties) that exist to enhance performance – an idea Roth sees as yet another joke. However, in 1936 Pierre de Coubertin was not joking when he raised a variation on the ‘Wheaties problem’ (i.e. the problem of

Philip Roth 143 scientific supplements or ‘unfair assistance’). He suggested that scientific advances might include the manufacture of track shoes ‘with springs that would somehow throw the runner forward with each step. [Hence], the speed achieved in this way will not be entirely his own’.230 He will have an obvious ‘unfair advantage’ over other runners. Ellis’s views (and those of the track shoe manufacturer) lead to questions of who owns the athlete’s body and, of course, its physical modification in the interests of performance and results. Yet winning is ‘the name of the game. [...] All the world loves a winner. Show me a good loser, said Leo Durocher and I’ll show you a loser’.231 Americanisation, ‘African’ body-cultures and resistance Smith/Roth also implicitly critiques the global colonisation of sport by Western proselytisers. While Britain and its imperial agencies are renowned for having diffused sports to its colonies, the global reach of American sports has been less pronounced and more recent. In The Great American Novel the Americanisation of sport is exemplified by Fairsmith’s attempt to introduce baseball to ‘the primitive interior of Africa’, following a previous mission to Japan.232 With equipment donated by the schoolchildren of Ruppert and helped by his nephew Billy, Fairsmith demonstrated the fundamentals of the game to indigenous natives in an unnamed region of central Africa. In doing so he was only following the advice of no less than de Coubertin who wrote: If one wishes to extend to natives in colonized countries what we boldly call the benefits of ‘athletic civilization’, they must be made to enter into the broad athletic system with codified regulations and comparative results, which is the necessary basis of that civilization.233 The notion that ‘the African native’ could be readily transformed into a Western athlete was a conversionist fantasy that was widely present in early twentiethcentury colonial discourse. Franz Fanon’s view would have been that Fairsmith saw in the ‘negro’ sporting qualities that he lacked himself234 but which were ready for use and transformation by the colonial power. ‘Mister Fairsmith did not have to remind these savages [...] to follow through with the swing’ as such an athletic skill ‘was in their blood. They were ‘naturals’.235 The natural ability of native peoples to excel in Western sports has long been attributed to athletes, boxers, footballers and others236 but the notion of ‘the natural’ is now generally regarded as a myth or a form of stereotyping.237 Today, such views have been replaced by the idea of sport as culture, not biology. However, as with much of the rhetoric of sport and indigenous body-cultures, Smith and Fairsmith conflated ‘the savage’ with the ‘skilled athlete’. Of greater interest in reading Fairsmith’s attempt to diffuse baseball to Africa is (I think) the way in which Roth presents the tension and subsequent conflict between the natives and the cultural imperialist. This can be seen in the respective attitude of Fairsmith and that of the natives to ‘sliding’. Sliding occurs in

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baseball when a player, acting as a baserunner, drops his body to the ground when he is close to a base. There are several reasons for this: for example, the baserunner’s body being nearer the ground makes it more difficult for the fielder to tag him. In several situations, players are advised not to slide, for example, on plays when being neither tagged out nor when overrunning the base is at issue. Fairsmith observed that the African natives ‘did not flinch from “hitting the dirt”’ and ‘slid with abandon whether a slide was in order or not’.238 Fairsmith was furious but they insisted on sliding into first base, a strategy he regarded as a ‘stupid passion’ and not necessary in the American game in which it was an unwritten rule not to slide to first base after receiving a walk: but it was not de jure. The native leader, whom Fairsmith had named Walter Johnson (after a 1920s right-handed pitcher with the Washington Nationals/Senators), outsmarted him by remembering the rules of baseball from his first lesson and Fairsmith was unable to quote a rule that denied sliding when it was technically not required. Billy, his intrepid translator, noted: [Johnson] says that though they will follow to the letter the rules of the white man’s game, they refuse to be enslaved by arbitrary strictures designed to rob them of their inalienable cultural rights. By denying the men the right to slide into first having been awarded a ball or balls, you have grievously insulted their masculinity.239 Fairsmith was adamant that he would not allow baseball ‘to become a primitive rite of savages’ and that he would die ‘a martyr to the national pastime’.240 He adopted a Eurocentric view of African customs and a conservative inflexibility to an African ‘style’ within the existing rules. As a result he and Billy were strung up on trees and made to witness other native uses of baseball. So before deconstructing Roth’s pages on Fairsmith it is worth noting some ways in which the Africans had appropriated the American game to produce hybrid ballgames. These, briefly, were: (a) a young boy’s game involving the devouring of a ball’s covering, the winner being the boy who could eat the most balls; (b) the hitting contest involving a ‘shrivelled head’, the winner being the batter who can first smash it into smithereens; (c) the ceremony of the virgins and the baseball bats in which each bat is used for the ‘deflowering’ of a virgin (each bat being first subjected to a ‘meticulous hygiene ritual’). Is this bizarre fiction or ethnographic truth? There was certainly no shortage of titillating reporting in both colonial writing and photographic images, as readers of the National Geographic will have no doubt noticed.241 British explorers recorded native images similar to that of Fairsmith. For example, in Kenya an anthropologist was at pains to record such events as native foot races, part of a rite of passage among Kikuyu young men, that concluded with ‘masturbatory ejaculation’ on women’s bodies or in their presence.242 Such reporting matched the kind of information supplied by Fairsmith about the post-game rituals and it came close to the kind of detail that the Geographic supplied to satisfy the prurient gaze of their readers.

Philip Roth 145 Equally akin to Fairsmith’s experience is the appropriation of English cricket in Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands, in eastern New Guinea, and the object of a marvellous anthropological movie by Jerry Leach and Gary Kildea. In a way, the insistence of the Trobriand Islanders in altering cricket is not unlike that of the cult of sliding among the African baseball players. Reverend M. K. Gilmour, a British Methodist missionary, had introduced cricket to Trobriand Islanders in the late nineteenth century, his aim being to produce ‘cricket-loving Christians’.243 In doing so do it was hoped that the natives would become more docile as their own body-cultural practices were considered dangerous. Selfinterest and paternalism went hand in hand. But like Roth’s ‘Africans’, the Trobriand Islanders ‘took’ English cricket and turned it into their own game and a new ritual.244 Among the changes they made to the English game were that the home team would always be the winner but should not win by such a margin that it would humiliate their opponents. Also, 50 or more players could make up each team. The world-renowned Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski witnessed the Trobriand version of cricket on the island of Kiriwini but he readily recognised that the native people had transformed it from its English origins. To the English he saw cricket as synonymous with honour and sportsmanship; as a Pole he read it as a pointless, tedious waste of time; but to the Kiriwinian it was a cause for violent quarrelling and strong passion as well as new forms of gambling.245 Fairsmith found it impossible to think in such terms, to acknowledge different ‘ways of seeing’ a particular body-cultural practice. And because Fairsmith’s Africans only broke an unwritten rule, the agency of the Trobriand Islanders can be read as having been more powerful as it involved them in rewriting (metaphorically) the rules of cricket. In this case the ‘fact’ is as good, if not better, an example of appropriation than the ‘fiction’. And Roth’s example of the ‘sliding question’ and his allusions to the use of baseball equipment for ritual purposes, while presented as fiction, can be matched by authenticated examples from serious anthropological studies.246 A postcolonial reading of Fairsmith’s report might see the African appropriation of baseball as a form of resistance. Elleke Boehmer notes that native colonials ‘could transform the condition of mimicking the coloniser’s moves into a strategy of resistance’247 and Walter Johnson, on the one hand, and the islanders of Kiriwina on the other represent such resistance. Recalling Fairsmith’s earlier visit to Japan, Roth may have been aware that the American Horace Wilson had introduced baseball to (what is today) Tokyo University in 1873 and by 1915 it had become widespread.248 But the result of Fairsmith’s hope to implant, along with Christianity, a pure form of an American sport was not simply a failure that resulted from African resistance: it also produced a ‘sportoid’ or a hybrid form of baseball with sports equipment being used for unintended purposes. Roth/Smith records the strong opposition by colonised peoples to the pure form of American baseball and the inability of the globalised rules – even the unwritten rules – to make the natives play the American way. There was no room for a US compromise. African elements (the sliding and the desecration of baseball equipment) would Africanise baseball – anathema to the muscular

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Christian. Additionally, a further postcolonial reading of Smith’s text suggests that Fairsmith’s rhetoric was fractured, a common textual characteristic of colonial writing. That is, more than one rhetorical mode was used to record the Europeans’ views of the native. So Fairsmith is able to describe the ‘Africans’ as natural athletes but at the same time call them savages – idealising them and negating them at the same time.249 The examples from The Great American Novel that are summarised above are only a few of Roth’s numerous bizarre blurrings of fact and fiction and, in the space available, all I have been able to do is to provide a feel for the kind of writing and the sort of yarns that Roth employs in what is arguably his wackiest book. In the end Smith was unable to find anyone to publish his magnum opus. 27 publishers rejected it. Typical reviews included: ‘Dear Mr Smith, We find your novel far-fetched and lacking authenticity and are returning it herewith.’ Another notes: ‘Dear Mr Smith: Too long and a little old hat. Sorry.’ And another: I am returning your manuscript. Several people here found portions of it entertaining, but by and large the book seemed to most of us to strain for its effects and to simplify for the sake of facile satiric commentary the complex realities of American political and cultural life.250 In the end Smith sent his manuscript to Mao Tse-tung for possible publication in Peking! The Great American Novel and the ‘truth’ As Bernard Rodgers has noted, in Roth’s work ‘the line between reality and fantasy becomes more difficult to discern’.251 In Roth’s own words, in Reading Myself and Others he tried to ‘establish a kind of passageway from the imaginary that comes to seem real to the real that comes to seem imaginary, a continuum between the credible incredible and the incredible credible’.252 Big John Baal states that a ‘word, why it don’t mean a thing that I ever could see. A whole speech is just a bunch of words from beginning to end, you know, that didn’t fool nobody yet what’s got half a brain in his head’.253 Here we are back to Through the Looking Glass where Humpty Dumpty observed that ‘When I use a word it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more or less’, to which Alice responds, ‘The question is whether you can make words mean different things’254 – the postmodern condition if ever there was one, if not presented via the lenses of Saussure or Lacan. Of course, postmodern students of sport have explored the question of writing sport but none in such a humorous and explicitly self-reflective a way as the Reverend Charles Dodgson and especially the novelist Philip Roth. Recall that in The Great American Novel the question is raised about how sport should be represented, for example, on the field of play or via radio broadcasts. But Smith (Roth) also notes the impossibility of communicating the

Philip Roth 147 meaning of baseball through words (printed or spoken), ‘even words as poetical and inspirational as those Mister Fairsmith was good at’.255 In the representation of sport, writing may have given way to other media and with the passing of time it is television which has become the defining reality of sport with ‘live’ matches being watched in pubs and bars, on large screens in city squares and in the domestic container of the home. For many viewers the simulation has become better than the reality and Roth elaborates on this by using the rambling thoughts of Smith when he raises questions about ‘the real’ and the ‘imagined’: ‘[R]eal life is always running away from itself, whereas imagination is shackled by innocence, delusion, hope, ignorance, obedience, fear, sweetness, et cetera.’256 This has great significance, of course, to sport, notably the world of written sport. In The Great American Novel Smith avers that the truth is indeed stranger than fiction. But, he adds, ‘stranger still are lies’.257 However, it cannot be overlooked that Smith’s own words (and Zuckerman’s and Klugman’s) are ‘only offering a “version” of reality [that are often] wildly inventive and fantastic’.258 And in The Human Stain it can be seen that ‘much of what transpires is just as much a matter of the narrator’s imagination as it is of recorded fact’.259 What’s more, whatever we think we know about sport there is more that we don’t know: Roth notes, ‘All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.’260 This raises the question of ‘truth’ in The Great American Novel that, on the face of it, is comic fiction. However, I have already noted the ‘factual’ dimensions of the book and furthermore, as the postmodernist historian Hayden White notes, ‘the difference between a merely truthful account of an event [e.g. baseball in the War years] of the kind provided by [...] witnesses, and an artistic treatment of a real event [...] which transcends the truth–reality distinction’.261 Roth deals with real events: baseball in the 1940s to the 1970s, the drawing-up of the rules of baseball, the diffusion of baseball to foreign lands, the techniques of the sport, the corruption of it and the recruitment of players. These events happened. Again, drawing on White, even though Roth is writing about real events that took place at a real time, ‘it makes as little sense to ask of his work what is true and what is false about it as it does to ask of Picasso’s Guernica what of it is true and what of it is false’.262 Is modern sport and the corruption that surrounds it any less ‘fantastic’ than the details chronicled in Smith’s paranoid ranting? It would take another chapter (perhaps another book) to chronicle the bizarre life styles, the deviousness, scheming and corruption of sports-workers, journalists, coaches and administrators that seem to be beyond belief. Like politics, sport ‘tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of novelists’.263 Who, for example, could have invented Mike Tyson? O. J. Simpson? Ben Johnson? David Beckham? Wayne Rooney, Tonya Harding, Florence Griffith Joyner, Boris Becker, Jeffrey Archer, Antonio Samaranch? Then there is the widespread fixing of games: endemic doping; widespread gambling corruption; excessive violence; I could go on. Anyway, the details are already available.264

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Concluding comments Roth expert Derek Parker Royal notes that throughout his career ‘Philip Roth has displayed an ambiguous style of narrative that makes it difficult to pinpoint any definitive ideological stance.’265 However, some critics (notably Marshall Berman) have no qualms about labelling him as ‘part of the left’.266 There seems to be little doubt that he is anti-establishment. But it is not quite so clear when it comes to his attitudes about sports. A life-long sports fan, he can mock, lampoon and denigrate Sportsworld USA. Philip Roth grew up with a love of sport, especially baseball, but he seems to have discovered the ideological base of US sport by the time he reached Bucknell. Once there he recognised that sport always ran the risk of being idealised, romanticised and pastoralised, and would come to mirror America’s mythic image. Roth, like the neo-Marxist, is able to show that sport can be a prison of measured time as the antics of Ron Patimkin, Swede Levov and Coleman Silk demonstrate. However, it would be foolish to compartmentalise Roth as using any particular approach to writing and he treats sports in at least three modes – realistic, mythic and romantic. As Royal points out, Roth’s/Smith’s ‘slippery usage of language calls into question [his] ability to capture the “true” essence of the sport’.267 However, this raises the tricky question of whether a ‘floating signifier’ such as ‘sport’ does or can possess an ‘essence’. Roth’s most relevant contribution to sport studies is, I suggest, The Great American Novel in which sport (baseball) is both the central theme and one that is cruelly and crudely satirised. Yet a work in which the representation of sport is such a central feature is oddly missing from recent critical works in sports history that seek to explore sports writing and its links with postmodernism, truth and fiction.268 Yet his blurring of truth and fiction, and making truth sound like fiction and vice versa, would seem to be a classic illustration of ‘recognizing the “fictional” aspect of all social “science” writing [and writing per se], including the ways in which researchers write reality and people’s understanding of it’.269 Gunnar Olsson asks, ‘what will it look like, the work which will do to the social sciences what Joyce’s Ulysses did to the novel?’270 Well, perhaps, in The Great American Novel one can find a work that does for sports studies what Joyce did for the novel. After all, most dimensions of sports are in there, albeit in fantastical form. Again drawing on Joyce and Olsson, perhaps Roth has achieved something of a unity between the structure of the phenomenon (i.e. sport) that he has been working on and the structure of the language that he has been performing in.271 In this case, each of the structures are jokes. I read Roth’s comments on sport as reflecting a negative attitude towards corrupt sport, to over-serious sport, to oppressive sport, and to sanitised sport – in other words, to modern achievement sport. And while he can write in nostalgic and heroic modes such representations are often ironic. As Jack Higgs notes, ‘he captures the American scene well in regard to sports and play with honesty, realism, imagination and a lot of humor, always subversive but never radical’.272 And, I think, he is clearly aware that a golden age never existed, even at Weequahic High.

8

Fictions, facts, binaries and place

As always, analysis is more difficult than general pro-and-contra clichés. Hans Lenk1

Clearly, a huge amount of sports writing supports the status quo, that is, the voices that contribute to the pro-sport discourse outlined in my opening chapter, including the many hagiographies and the regular newspaper reports of sporting contests. To these could be added the writings of many sports histories, works that often degenerate into gazetteers of results, performances or sensationalism. While literary fiction might be equally banal, German scholars Hans Lenk and Gunter Gebauer have addressed the question of the critical possibilities of sports writing. They suggest that sports fiction possesses a critical potential that is lost by those works that simply seek to reconstruct sporting events.2 ‘Narratives in sport literature’, they add, ‘have a greater flexibility than historical reports.’3 Likewise, John Carey adds that a writer of fiction can go much further than a scientist, changing the world in fictional terms in a way that mortals only dream of.4 It is not that scientist and novelist deal with different objects but that they deal with the same objects in different ways.5 Jeffrey Hill notes that a fictional work is unlike an ‘objective’ academic study in that it ‘does not stand outside its subject’.6 Some of the enduring qualities of sport such as pain and camaraderie, for example, are not analysed in fictional work but are presented more as existential statements of what sporting work and life are like. And fiction does not necessarily set out to represent some kind of ‘reliable’ form of the world but, often, to play with it (as in the work, for example, of Charles Dodgson and Philip Roth). Sport is not only constructed and reconstructed through fiction: as this book has attempted to show, it is also deconstructed. Taking the thoughts of Lenk and Gebauer further, what they call ‘trivial sports stories’ can be compared with what they describe as ‘higher-level creations of sport literature’.7 If, as Douglas Booth suggests, the representation model of recording sport is to discover the past as it actually was and that the deconstruction model is to reflect on a fragmented and partial past,8 then fictional work has a greater potential than say, journalism, in deconstructing the world of sports. This is not to say that banal sports fiction cannot engage the writer or reader in deconstruction:

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but if we accept the existence of what Lenk and Gebauer unashamedly call sport narratives ‘of an artistic calibre’, these approaches, as ‘art’, are most likely ‘to use unusual means of representation and perspectives to discover and produce interpretations different from the day-to-day understanding of sport actions, symbols, heroes, losers, events and their meanings’.9 This is because art has long since dispelled the function of interpreting the world as it is. By the middle of the [nineteenth] century the arts gave up depicting and realistically representing individual actions. Instead, they concentrated on alternative ways of ‘worldmaking’ or on elaborating pungent criticisms. This is true of high-level sport literature, too. Its fascination, therefore, resides with the freedom of interpretations it provides.10 This suggests that the written works of (at least) Dodgson, Roth, Sillitoe and Sorley are transgressive solely on the basis of their approach to writing bodycultural practices. In each case they clearly cut across boundaries of convention and are (somewhat, at least) out of place, as are, but less obviously, the works of Betjeman and Jerome. However, I think that there is much more to it than that and it is not simply the case of the creative writer capturing the flavour of, say, a great sporting event or athletic performance better than the academic or scientist. Nor is it simply a question of the creative writer having the freedom of interpretation. Fiction may supply new perspectives and may, indeed, be more ‘accurate’ than science even in reconstruction and prediction. Assuming (with good reason, I believe) that sport is a science, consider the comments of Robert C. Goldbort: Fiction about [sports] science merits as much attention as, say sociological or cultural studies of [sports] science. The unique contribution of fiction to the study of [sport’s] scientific ethics is that, in presenting parallel worlds, it not only reflects reality but judges it. In doing so fictional scenarios function to help us achieve a higher perspective with regard to the relation between our personal ethos and the ever-evolving ethos of [sport’s] scientific enterprise.11 To a degree, the Danish writer Knud Lundberg, in his book The Olympic Hope, implicitly addressed this question. As a sportsman, a writer and having been trained in medicine, he highlighted the horrors of genetic and pharmaceutical tampering with the human body in the context of track running at the Olympic level. His work, published in 1955, was arguably well in advance of the writing on cyborgs by sports sociologists.12 Taking this tack a bit further, in an essay on representation and reality, a geographer, Matthew Hannah, has noted that it ‘is no longer possible to take for granted that academics produce “objective” knowledge that represents reality “more accurately” than lay knowledge’.13 So it is not simply a case of fictional writing complementing ‘scientific’ studies. For example, Alan Tomlinson has succinctly illustrated the inadequacy of sociological writing about sport and the

Fictions, facts, binaries and place 151 working class. He took the language of the social scientist Ferdinand Zweig and compared it with that of the novelist David Storey. Consider the words of Zweig: The British worker regards himself as a sportsman. He thinks of the true sportsman as the perfect man, and his whole life is built up around the code of sportsmanship. His strong feelings about fair play and equality of opportunity are all of them based on this code.14 Compared with Storey’s description of the working-class sportsman in This Sporting Life, Zweig’s ‘sociological musings are little more than cultural fictions or myths’.15 The novel is in this case the more revealing cultural document than the sociological report from the field. Steve Redhead makes precisely the same point in his work on the football fiction of John King, stating that King’s writing, for example, is ‘more evocative of aspects of working-class culture, and its history [...] than much of the academic sociology, cultural studies or social history of their day’.16 So it should not be assumed that imaginative literature is ‘unreliable’ or ‘untrue’. The texts considered in the previous chapters reveal critiques of sports that disturb and contest the ‘commonsense’ or ‘taken for granted’ views that are often held about them: as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, in ‘much that is classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is considered important to the overall effect’.17

Fractures and binaries It has long been clear that ‘sporting discourse is beset by a deep cleavage between its typification as an heroic, almost spiritual activity which transcends the mundane conflicts of everyday life and a contrary view of the partisan, competitive nature of sporting affiliation’.18 In this book I have sought to identify further cleavages, or at least fractures, that are found within the anti-sport discourse. Put simply, while a huge number of oppositional voices can be identified in literary works, they do not speak with the same tone, the same strength or the same intention. Indeed, in several cases (contra the strident polemics of neo-Marxists) literary oppositions to sport may have been unintentional and are often ambivalent. The word ‘oppose’ hides a range of oppositions. In the final few pages of this book I want to consider the highly fractured nature of the anti-sport discourse in light of the previous pages of this work. The binary representation of sporting attitudes (i.e. Pro-sport/Anti-sport) is clearly unsatisfactory when a wide variety of (in this case, anti-sport) perspectives are present and when the word ‘sport’ itself poses so many problems of definition. There are as many reasons and ways to oppose sport as there are interpretations of what sport is. For example, Charles Dodgson saw ‘sport’ principally as hunting. Cricket was something else, an ‘athletic pursuit’ along with rowing, athletics, tennis, football and rugby. He had no sympathy for hunting but did aver that he was ‘not entirely without sympathy for genuine “Sport”’ but his ‘not entirely’ implies that he was, to some extent at least, unsympathetic to it (whatever ‘genuine sport’

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was).19 In terms of his attitude towards both ‘sport’ and athletic pursuits, however, he was unwilling to participate in either, except as a spectator or at a playful level. John Betjeman could ride a bike but he wouldn’t have had the nerve to race around the track of a velodrome. And he was happy enough messing about at golf and tennis and losing his loose shorts in the surf. Jerome K. Jerome enjoyed amateur sport but disliked the corruption that went (as he saw it) with professionalism. Charles Sorley had competed on the running track but much preferred the sensuousness of his downland running. Alan Sillitoe had tasted sport but opposed it fundamentally while Roth engaged in a love–hate lifetime of sport, appreciating its joys but loathing and lampooning many of its manifestations. The attitudes of each of the six authors are reflected in the distinction between the relative freedom of recreation (or the more nuanced ‘re-creation’) in which many of them participated, and the work-like quality of serious sport that they regarded with sentiments ranging from distaste to hatred. However, none except Sillitoe, I suggest, goes so far as to ask what people are being re-created for. The neoMarxists’ response would be: for more work. Where does the distaste for sport come from? It has not been my aim to generalise from a sample of six writers but it is noticeable that at least half of them make it clear that bad experiences of sport at school predisposed them to antisport sentiments in later life: for these authors sport amounted to intimidation and bullying. Betjeman, with his pushy father, turned to autodidactic recreational biking, swimming and surfing, supplying a counterpoint to the compulsory sport on the school curriculum by playing the fool, taking it gently and simply messing about. Likewise, who can deny the possibility that Dodgson’s school experience at Rugby may have meant that his participation in university sports was as a spectator. And perhaps his non-competitiveness had an effect on his practical reformulation of the rules of tennis or on his fictional representation of a more egalitarian form of running. It is not so obvious how the negative attitudes of Jerome and Sillitoe were formed. In a sense the two are polarised: Jerome, for part of his life, seemed to be a supporter of sport, though not in some of its manifestations such the growth of professionalism, the sports hero and women’s participation in football. Sillitoe, the most working-class representative of the sextet, is clearly closest to the Brohms, Rigauers and Hochs of this world. He was often termed a ‘Marxist’ and was accused of communist sympathies. His critique is more ideological. Roth, as noted earlier, is the most ‘fannish’ of the group, the most knowledgeable about sport, but ambivalent and ironic. More than any of the other writers Roth critiques sport because he can recognise in it infantile qualities and anti-intellectualism. He also dislikes the way sport reflects the political economy, in this case embracing liberal or even leftist sentiments. So, the writings of the six writers span the anti-sport spectrum but none of their ponderings reflect the hardcore ideological positions of either neo-fascism or neo-Marxism. The essays in this book also provide glimpses of moral and spiritual qualities in the writing of Dodgson and Jerome, attacking as they do the morality of animal sports, commodification, professionalism and (to an extent) gambling. Sorley

Fictions, facts, binaries and place 153 attacks careerism (faster, higher, stronger) and Betjeman questions the ethics of planning and conservation – the former being central in the provision of sports places (can anything be more planned than a sports stadium?) and the latter now beginning to be part of the ‘heritage business’. One of the characteristics of the anti-sport discourse appears to be the significance of nostalgia (sport as ante sport) that commonly forms part of the critique. Betjeman is arguably the most nostalgic, followed perhaps by Dodgson and Sorley. Philip Roth also lapses into nostalgia in several of his works while Sillitoe appears to be, unsurprisingly, the least nostalgic. But again each of them reveals differing degrees of ambiguity and inconsistency. However, like sport, ‘nostalgia’ cannot be reduced to a singular or essential definition. There are modalities of nostalgia, for example, the accommodation of progressive, even utopian inclinations as well as attitudes that are melancholic and conservative in character.20

Placing anti-sport writing In my introduction I outlined the ideologically motivated anti-sport stance of members of the neo-Marxist and neo-fascist schools of criticism. However, novelists like Alan Sillitoe and David Storey made almost exactly the same points as the neo-Marxists through the voices of their runner and rugby player respectively. Storey’s thoughts, as summarised by Jeffrey Hill, almost reflect those of Brohm: Machin struggles ‘to release himself from the cultural cage in which he is trapped’.21 However, for most students studying the cultural–political dimensions of sport, it will be Brohm’s Prison of Measured Time that is privileged as obligatory reading rather than Storey’s representation of the ‘cultural cage’, or as Machin called the game, a ‘long drag’.22 Bero Rigauer’s book is about Sport and Work; David Storey shows how sport is work or feels to be work. The academic privileging of writings from Marxists and less polemical academic texts such as the 2006 anti-sport book Fastest, Highest, Strongest23 comes from what is perceived as their ‘intellectual’ or ‘scholarly’ status whereas Storey’s book is, well, a story. A particular book (say Alice in Wonderland) may be put on a reading list for English literature students but it is much less likely to be recommended to students of sports studies. The overwhelming majority of sports scholars have ignored Charles Dodgson because he is viewed as a writer of children’s stories that are also said to be ‘nonsense’. Similarly, Jerome K. Jerome is seen as a ‘lightweight’, not rigorous enough for scholarly interpretation, and whose journalistic writings are relatively unknown. The same might be said of John Betjeman and, I argue, what associations he has with sport have been usually misread. Philip Roth is labelled a ‘postmodernist’ and, hence, hardly read as an authority. To return to the words of Robert Goldbort, sports fiction merits as much attention as, say sociological or cultural studies of sports but, as Hill has pointed out, there is a ‘hierarchy of value’ in sports writing.24 This suggests an academic–vernacular or science–fiction binary. Librarians and bookshop workers normally have little trouble placing a book in a particular category. However, occasionally a book creeps into one section in one bookstore and into a different

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section in another. I noted this with the case of Brett Hutchins’s revisionist biography of the Australian cricketer Donald Bradman. In one bookshop I visited it was placed in the ‘Sports’ section, along with revelations of the stars and picture books of sports for child fans; in another it appeared under ‘Sociology’ stacked alongside books by the likes of Giddens, Gramsci and Goffman. I have little doubt that in other stores it would be placed under ‘Biography’. This may appear a rather banal example but it points towards the arbitrariness of the way in which knowledge is classified, packaged and placed. It also raises the question of the notion of ‘sports fiction’ as an academic speciality, a discipline, or a subject that stands clearly and discretely on its own, with its own conferences and its own journal.25 If its practitioners make claims for it to be a distinct ‘discipline’ or ‘subdiscipline’, where does it stand (or lie) in the academic hierarchy? This book has at least tried to challenge this hierarchical approach by stressing the (potential) role of some unlikely authors who, I suggest, have the potential to influence and inform attitudes towards sporting matters.

The illusion of sports fiction In recent years there has been something of a ‘literary turn’ in sports studies. By this I do not only refer to the kinds of study that make up the previous chapters, nor to the debate about whether it is possible to write a truthful book about sport (or anything else). Running in parallel with this so-called ‘turn’ there has also been a call to engage with the ways scholars (not novelists) set about the business of writing sport. There have been suggestions that the representation of sport can be undertaken through, for example, confessions, autoethnography, poetry, ethnodrama and fiction.26 Such an explicit ‘literaturisation’ of sports research poses several problems (as its proponents admit) but the reasons for so doing resonate with the contents of the present work. Such works stress the case for uncertainty, lack of knowledge, the floating signifier of ‘sport’ and the shifting bases of ‘truth’. In other words what exists is a sporting world of slipperiness, disorder and sometimes chaos. In the case of the present work, I have dealt with how sport might be written, by whom and where it has been written: by people apparently unrelated to sport (‘outsiders’) and writing in the interstices of the standard spaces that serve to classify written work. I think that this shift of emphasis should be welcomed but I also think that there is much unrecognised fictional writing of sport (hiding) before our very eyes. If we look carefully we can search it out. I have presented numerous examples in this book with six detailed studies of well known authors of literary works, each having something to say about body-culture in general and sport in particular. None would claim to be a writer of ‘sport fiction’. It is time to explore the huge archive of written work on body-cultural practices (including ‘sport’) that lies outside the cloistered world of the university library, the sport section of the high street bookshop and the arbitrarily defined and illusory fields of ‘sports literature’ and ‘sports fiction’ – which have neither existence nor future.27

Notes

Acknowledgements 1 Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984, pp. ix–x. 1 Sport and literature 1 Charles Fruehling Springwood, Cooperstown to Dyersville: A Geography of Baseball Nostalgia, Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, p. 183. 2 Among the numerous ‘classifications’ of body-cultural configurations, see Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (trans. Meyer Brasch), New York: Free Press, 1961; Jacques Ehrmann, ‘Homo ludens revisited’, Yale French Studies, 41, 1968, pp. 31–57 (reprinted in Jacques Ehrmann (ed.) Game, Play, Literature, Boston: Beacon Press, 1968; Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978; Henning Eichberg, Body Cultures: Essays on Sport, Space and Identity (eds John Bale and Chris Philo), London: Routledge, 1997; Richard Guilianotti, Sport: A Critical Sociology, Cambridge: Polity, 2005, pp. xii–xiii, and specifically in the context of ‘sports fiction’, Christian Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 3 Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. xii. However, it can be argued that ‘play’ cannot be extracted from ‘ordinary life’ and compartmentalised neatly and categorically from ‘work’ as it is not without ‘value’: Ehrmann, ‘Homo ludens revisited’. Note also that play is not neutral and has its negative side, notably when a player is the object of another’s play, an observation made by Tuan in Escapism. 4 ‘Sport’, like ‘literature’, is a term that is extremely difficult to define (note the similarity of ‘define’ and ‘definite’). This may need explaining. The written mark ‘SPORT’ is a signifier used to convey meaning while the signified is the meaning connoted by the signifier. However, sport carries so many different connotations that it may be best to label such words ‘floating signifiers’; that is to say, it connotes different things to different people. Likewise, in relation to ‘literature’, it has been stated that to find ‘some constant set of inherent features [...] would be as impossible as trying to identity a single distinguishing feature which all games [and sports] have in common. There is ‘no “essence” of literature whatsoever’: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 9. 5 William E. Winn, ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays and the development of “Muscular Christianity”’, Church History, 29, 1, 1960, p. 66. Kingsley was almost certainly influenced in his ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. 6 Winn, ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, p. 67.

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7 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, London: Frank Cass, [1981] 2000, pp. 14–15. 8 P. W. Musgrave, From Brown to Bunter: The Life and Death of the School Story, London: Routledge, 1985, p. 48. 9 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, London: Macmillan, [1861] 1889, pp. 94–108. 10 Winn, ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, p. 69. 11 Ibid., p. 71. 12 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, London: Macmillan, 1896, p. 313. 13 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 182–183. 14 Scott Crawford, ‘Wilkie Collins: Master of melodrama and critic of Victorian Athleticism’, Aethlon, 5, 2, 1988, pp. 87–96. 15 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, (ed. Norbert Müller): Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000, p. 52. 16 On Merriwell see Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982, pp. 27–29 and pp. 19–23. 17 Steven Reiss, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999, p. 25. 18 E. Wendy Saul and R. Gordon Kelly, ‘Christians, Brahmins and other sporting fellows: An analysis of school sports stories’, Children’s Literature in Education, 15, 4, 1984, pp. 234–245. 19 Anthony Bateman, The Politics of the Aesthetic: Cricket, Literature, and Culture, 1850–1965, unpublished PhD thesis, Salford: University of Salford, 2005. 20 David Smith, ‘“A little more play”: Cricket in Dickens’s fiction’, The Dickensian, 86, 1, 1990, p. 43. See also Mark Hennelly, ‘Dickens’s Praise of folly: Play in The Pickwick Papers’, Dickens Quarterly, 3, 1986, pp. 27–45. 21 Ibid., p. 44. 22 John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, London: Leicester University Press, 1994, pp. 148–165. 23 Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 24 George Mosse, The Image of Man, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 113. 25 Harold Segal, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. 163. On Montherlont see also Allen Guttmann, The Erotic in Sport, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 26 George Orwell, ‘Boys’ weeklies’, in Critical Essays, London: Secker & Warburg, 1946, pp. 61–91. Originally published in Horizon, 3, 1940. See www.orwell.ru/library/ essays/boys/english/e_boys (accessed 2 February 2007). 27 W. S. K. Webb (pen name of William Dalton), The Truth about Wilson, London: Red Letter Library, 1962. 28 Jeffrey Hill, ‘“I’ll run him’: Alf Tupper, social class and British amateurism’, Sport in History, 26, 3, 2006, pp. 502–519. On Tupper and Wilson see also Brendan Gallagher, Sporting Supermen, London: Aurum, 2006. 29 Andrew Blake, The Body Language: The Meaning of Modern Sport, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996, p. 178. On the ‘literaturisation’ of football see Steve Redhead, Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 88–92. On Fever Pitch see Merritt Moseley, ‘Nick Hornby, English football and Fever Pitch’, Aethlon, 11, 2, 1994, pp. 87–95. 30 Bateman, Politics of the Aesthetic. Anthologies that illustrate the strong literary traditions in cricket include Alan Ross (ed.), The Penguin Cricketer’s Companion, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 and Ramachandra Guha (ed.), The Picador Book of Cricket, London: Picador, 2001.

Notes 157 31 Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924, pp. 274, 293. 32 Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes. 33 Tim Harte, unpublished paper, 2003. 34 Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, London: Verso, 2002. 35 Steve Redhead, ‘This sporting life: The realism of The Football Factory’, Soccer and Society, 8, 1, 2007, pp. 90–108. 36 Department of Environment, Transport and Regions, Sport: Raising the Game, London: Department of National Heritage, 1995, p. 8. 37 Peter Oborne, ‘What’s cricket and what’s not: The secret sporting history of Tony Blair’, The Spectator, 17 September 2005 (I am grateful to Neal Garnham for this reference). 38 Quoted in Neil Isaacs, Jock Culture, U.S.A., New York: Norton, 1978, p. 163. On Nixon and sport see Philip Roth, Our Gang, London: Vintage, 2000 [1971]. 39 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso, 1991, p. 6. 40 Ibid., p. 46. 41 Smith, ‘A little more play’, p. 43. 42 Ibid. 43 Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport. 44 Alec Waugh, The Loom of Youth, London: The Richards Press, [1919] 1947, p. 306. 45 Alec Waugh, The Best Wine Last, London: W. H. Allen, 1978. 46 Quoted in D. J. Taylor, On the Corinthian Spirit, London: Yellow Jersey Press, London: 2006, p. 68. 47 George Orwell, ‘The sporting spirit’, Tribune, December, 1945. 48 John Hoberman, The Olympic Crisis: Sports, Politics and the Moral Order, New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1986. 49 Ibid., pp. 85–88. 50 Bateman, Politics of the Aesthetic. 51 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, [1981] 1991, pp. 89, 90. 52 Kathleen Blake, Play, Games and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 177. 53 Quoted in John Bale, Running Cultures: Racing in Time and Space, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 1. 54 Gagnier, Subjectivities. 55 Ibid., p. 181 (italics added). 56 Adolphe Abrahams and Harold Abrahams, Training for Athletics, London: Bell, 1929. 57 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, London: Faber and Faber, 1992. 58 Hoberman, The Olympic Crisis, p. 97. 59 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1938, pp. 336–365. 60 Paul Hoch, Rip Off the Big Game, New York: Anchor Books, 1972. 61 Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (trans. Ian Fraser), London: Ink Links, 1978; Bero Rigauer, Sport and Work (trans. Allen Guttmann), New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 62 Gerhard Vinnai, Football Mania (trans. David Fernbach and Martin Gillard), London: Ocean Books, 1973; Jack Scott, The Athletic Revolution, New York: The Free Press, 1971. 63 Garry Whannel, Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport, London: Pluto, 1983, p. 11. 64 John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, Cambridge: Polity, 1986. A useful 1970s review of ‘new left criticism’ on sport is the more pro-sport view of Hans Lenk, ‘Sport, achievement and the new left criticism’, Man and World, 5, 2, 1972, pp. 179–192. For a later and detailed critique see William Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

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65 Verner Møller, ‘The anti-doping campaign – farewell to the ideals of modernity’, in John Hoberman and Verner Møller (eds) Doping and Public Policy, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004, pp. 145–159. 66 Rob Beamish and Ian Ritchie, Fastest, Highest, Strongest: A Critique of HighPerformance Sport, New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 122. 67 Brian Pronger, Body Fascism: Salvation in the Technology of Physical Exercise, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, p. 122. 68 Quoted in Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, p. 88. 69 James Riordan, quoted in John Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology, London: Heinemann, 1984, p. 172. See also Petr Roubal, ‘Politics of gymnastics: mass gymnastic displays under communism in Central and Eastern Europe’, Body and Society, 9, 2, 2003, p. 7. 70 Hans Bonde, ‘The iconic symbolism of Niels Bukh: Aryan body culture, Danish gymnastics and Nordic tradition’, in J. A. Mangan (ed.) Superman Supreme, London: Frank Cass, 2000, p. 105. On Bukh see Hans Bonde, Gymnastics and Politics: Niels Bukh and Male Aesthetics, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006. 71 Hoberman, The Olympic Crisis, pp. 102–105. 72 Eagleton, Ideology, p. 48. 73 L. S. Wood and H. L. Burrows (eds), Sports and Pastimes in English Literature, London: Nelson, 1925, p. x. I am grateful to Tony Bateman for alerting me to this work. 74 Sven Lindqvist, Bench Press, London: Granta, 2003, p.13. 75 Steven Connor, ‘“My fortieth year had come and gone and I still throwing [sic] the javelin”: Beckett’s athletics’, Static, 1, 2005, p. 1, http://staticlondonconsortium.com/ issue01/connor_beckett.html (accessed 29 September 2005). I am grateful to Anthony Bale for this reference. 76 Edward Said, ‘John McEnroe plus Anyone’, London Review of Books, 1 July 1999, pp. 34–35. 77 Connor, ‘My fortieth year’. 78 Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 20. Oriard listed over 500 authors of ‘American sports fiction’ whose works had been published in America by 1980. Many of these authors wrote numerous such works: ibid., pp. 263–330. 79 Allen Guttmann, ‘Faustian athletes? Sports as a theme in modern German literature’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33, 1, 1987, p. 24. 80 Bateman, Politics of the Aesthetic. On Adorno and sport see David Inglis, ‘Theodore Adorno on Sport: “The jeu d’esprit of despair’”, in Richard Giulianotti (ed.) Sport and Modern Social Theorists, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, pp. 81–95. 81 Quoted in Roger Robinson, Running in Literature, Halcottsville, NY: Breakaway Books, 2003, pp. 145–146. 82 Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning, quoted in John Morefield, ‘The athlete as antagonist in the writings of Evelyn Waugh’, Aethlon, 7, 2, 1990, p. 11. 83 Ibid. 84 Melvin D. Palmer, ‘The sports novel: Mythic heroes and natural men’, Quest, 19, 1973, p. 57. 85 Jeffrey Hill, ‘Sport stripped bare: Deconstructing working-class masculinity’, Men and Masculinities, 7, 4, 2005, p. 420. 86 David Storey, This Sporting Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962, p. 22. 87 Jeffrey Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, p. 63. 88 Storey, This Sporting Life, p. 253. 89 David Storey, The Changing Room, London: Cape, 1972 90 Connor, ‘My fortieth year’, p. 1. 91 Ibid., p. 3. On Beckett’s sporting life see James Knowlson, Damned to Fail: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, p. 42. 92 Connor, ‘My fortieth year’, p. 2. 93 Ibid., p. 3.

Notes 159 94 Michel Leiris, Rules of the Game, Vol. 2, Scraps (trans. Lydia Davis), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1955], pp. 111, 107. 95 Ibid., p. 109. 96 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (trans. William Weaver), New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986, pp. 167–168. 97 Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir, London: Allen Lane, 2001, pp. 81–82. 98 Julie Myerson, Not a Games Person, London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2005. 99 Ibid., p. 11. 100 Ibid., p. 31. 101 Ibid., p. 34. 102 David Rowe, ‘“That misery of stringer’s clichés”: Sports writing’, Cultural Studies, 5, 1, 1991, p. 79. 103 Ibid. 104 Robinson, Running in Literature, p. 215. Robinson only deals with ‘running novels’ but I have changed his definition for application to ‘sport’ per se. 105 Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 6. 106 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, London: Penguin, 1963, p. 92. Valenki are felt boots (I am grateful to Erkki Vettenniemi for this reference). 107 Osip Mandelstam, Complete Poetry (trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago), Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973, p. 3. 108 Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 118–122. See also Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 32. 109 Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport. 110 Michael Oriard, ‘From Jane Allen to Water Dancer: A brief history of the feminist (?) sports novel’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33, 1, 1987, p. 9. See, however, Brooke K. Horvath and Sharon G. Carson, ‘Women’s sports poetry: Some observations and representative texts’, in Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.), The Achievement of American Sport Literature, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991, pp. 116–131, and Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play, pp. 154–191. 111 Smith, ‘A little more play’, p. 41. 2 Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll 1 Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (Alexander Woolcott, Intro.), London: The Nonesuch Press, 1939, p. 418. 2 A huge literature is associated with the works of Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson. See, for example, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C. L. Dodgson), London: Fisher Unwin, 1898; Langford Reed, The Life of Lewis Carroll, London: Foyle; 1932; Walter de la Mare, Lewis Carroll, London: Faber and Faber, 1942; Alexander Taylor, The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1952; Lewis Carroll, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, 2 vols, Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.), London: Cassell, 1953; Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, Edward Wakeling (ed.), Clifford: The Lewis Carroll Society, 8 vols, 1993–2004; Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll, London: Constable, 1954; Lewis Carroll, The Letters of Lewis Carroll, Morton Cohen (ed.), London: Macmillan, 1979; Jean Gattégno, Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking-Glass From Alice to Zeno, London: Allen and Unwin, 1977; Anne Clark, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: Dent, 1979; Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, The Red King’s Dream or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, London: Pimlico, 1996; Stephanie Lovett Stoffel, Lewis Carroll and Alice, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The definitive work is generally regarded to be Morton Cohen, Lewis Carroll, London: Macmillan, 1995. Of particular relevance to the theme of this chapter is Kathleen Blake, Play, Games and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.

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3 Dodgson’s attraction to young girls has been the subject of much discussion. See Gattégno, Lewis Carroll, pp. 80–96, and Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of the Dream Child, London: Peter Owen, 1997, who defend Dodgson from accusations of paedophilia. A typical response is that in his relationships with young girls ‘there is no evidence whatsoever that he made any sexual advances toward them’: Stoffel, Lewis Carroll and Alice, p. 47. But also note Brandon S. Centerwall, ‘Hiding in the sight: Nabokov and pedophilia’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 32, 3, 1990, p. 471. And Vladimir Nabokov stated that Lewis Carroll had ‘some pathetic affinity’ with Humbert Humbert with his ‘wretched perversion and ambiguous photographs’ but he ‘got away with it’: quoted in Margaret Morganroth Gullette, ‘The exile of adulthood: Pedophilia in the midlife novel’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 17, 3, 1984, p. 218n. Likewise, see Will Self, review (of Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition [introduction by Martin Gardner], London: Penguin, 2000) in The New Statesman, 25 December 2000, p. 88. 4 Peter Heath, ‘Introduction’ in The Philosopher’s Alice, London: Academy Editions, 1974, p. 4. 5 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1957], p. 242. 6 Heath, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 7 Except when Carroll is the named author. 8 Carroll, Diaries, p. 11. 9 Collingwood, Life and Letters. 10 Gattégno, Lewis Carroll, pp. 281–289. Carroll scholars have suggested that this contributed to his lifelong and ‘fundamental dislike’ of boys who, he felt, bordered on the impure. Florence Becker Lennon went so far as to suggest that ‘he saw something ugly and even cruel in masculinity’: Florence Becker Lennon, Lewis Carroll, London: Cassell, 1947, p. 213. That he only loved young girls and that he led a life devoid of adult company has been vigorously contested, notably by Leach, In the Shadow. There is considerable evidence in Dodgson’s diaries that he also had adult female and male friends: ibid. 11 Carroll, Letters, p. 32n. 12 These ‘worlds’ are suggested by Edmund Little, The Fantasts, Amersham: Avebury, 1984. 13 Quoted in J. A. Mangan, Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, London: Frank Cass, [1981] 2000, p. 122. 14 Oona H. Ball, Their Oxford Year, London: Methuen, 1909, p. 72. 15 Clark, Lewis Carroll, p. 64. 16 M. M. Stedman, Oxford: Its Life and Schools, London: Methuen, 1899, p. 88. 17 Ibid., p. 90. 18 Ibid., p. 93. 19 Jones and Gladstone, The Red King’s Dream, pp. 101, 185. 20 On the misrepresentation of Dodgson in many biographies see Leach, In the Shadow. 21 Carroll, Diaries, p. 17. 22 Ibid., p. 78. Note also H. S. Jones, ‘University and college sport’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford (vol. 7), Nineteenth Century Oxford (Part 2), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, pp. 517–543. 23 Carroll, Diaries, p. 41; Hudson, Lewis Carroll, p. 88. 24 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 7, p. 269. 25 Ibid., vol. 4, p. 162. 26 Quoted in Gattégno, Lewis Carroll, pp. 68–69. See also Hudson, Lewis Carroll, pp. 48–49 and De la Mare, Lewis Carroll, p. 42. 27 Blake, Play, Games and Sports, p. 60; Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 1, p. 277. 28 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 42, 103; ibid., vol. 2, p. 72. 29 Cohen, Lewis Carroll, p. 397.

Notes 161 30 Lewis Carroll, ‘Some popular fallacies about vivisection’, in The Works of Lewis Carroll, p. 1193. If Carroll made, on average, five visits per year to watch a sporting event, he would have been watching sport as often as he paid visits to art galleries but nowhere near as often as he visited the theatre: see Hugues Lebailly, C. L. Dodgson and the Victorian Cult of the Child, www.lookingforlewiscarroll.com/ originalarticles.html (accessed 16 September 2004). 31 In the mid nineteenth century ‘sport’ often meant hunting. Rowing, boxing and cricket, on the other hand, tended to be termed ‘athletic pursuits’. 32 Carroll, Diaries, p. 229. 33 Coveney, The Image of Childhood, p. 242. 34 Quoted in Hudson, Lewis Carroll, p. 41. 35 Carroll, Letters, p. 9. 36 H. D. Thoreau, ‘Walking’, www.ecotopia.org/ehof/thoreau/walking.html (accessed 3 March 2006). See also Morris Marples, Shanks’s Pony: A Study of Walking, London: Dent, 1959; Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993; Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York: Verso, 2000. None of the reviews noted above mention Carroll/Dodgson. 37 Solnit, Wanderlust. 38 Phyllis Greenacre, ‘From “The character of Dodgson as revealed in the writings of Carroll”’, in Robert Phillips (ed.), Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as seen through the Critics’ Looking-Glass 1865–1971, London: Gollancz, 1972, p. 317. 39 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 2, pp. 89–94. 40 Ibid., vol. 8, p. 78. 41 Carroll, Diaries, p. 229. 42 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 1, p. 115. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., vol. 7, p. 218. 45 Clark, Lewis Carroll, p. 59. The poet Edward Thomas felt that a person’s gait was like a hallmark or stamp of their identity. See Lucy Newlyn. ‘Hazlitt and Edward Thomas on walking’, Essays in Criticism, 56, 2, 2006, pp. 163–187. 46 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 7, p. 330. 47 Ibid., p. 335. 48 Ibid. 49 Gattégno, Lewis Carroll, pp. 68–69. 50 See Carroll, Complete Works, p. 883. 51 Carroll, Letters, p. 1043n. An admittedly spurious comparison with serious competitive walkers of the time (1870) shows that the fastest recorded time for walking twenty miles was covered at about 7.4 miles per hour. See Ekkehard zur Megede and Richard Hymans, Progression of World Best Performances and Official World Records, Monaco: IAAF, 1995, p. 342. Dodgson, walking on roads, lanes and paths (rather than a prepared track), was therefore walking at about half the speed of a ‘worldclass’ walker. 52 Carroll, Diaries, p. 229. 53 Lennon, Lewis Carroll, p. 316. 54 Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, pp. 229–230. A regular literary walker, Charles Dickens, walked at about the same pace: ibid. 55 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 8, p. 95. 56 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 142. 57 Carroll, Selected Letters, p. 217. 58 Adolphe Abrahams, The Human Machine, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956, p. 69. 59 Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, p. 171. 60 Marples, Shanks’s Pony, p. 26. 61 Cohen, Lewis Carroll, p. 238.

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62 Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 8, pp. 95–267. 63 Tim Edensor, ‘Walking in the British countryside: Reflexivity, embodied practices and ways of escape’, Body and Society, 6, 1995, pp. 3–4, p. 81; John Wylie, ‘A single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 2, 2005, pp. 234–247. 64 Ibid., p. 235. 65 Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, p. 255. 66 Quoted in Stoffel, Lewis Carroll and Alice, p. 149, italics added. 67 Quoted in Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 119. 68 Thoreau, ‘Walking’, italics added. 69 Carroll, Diaries, vol. 7, pp. 486–487. 70 Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 17–19 (italics in original). 71 De la Mare, Lewis Carroll, p. 47. 72 Björn Sundmark, Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum, Lund: Lund University Press, 1999, p. 86. 73 Ibid., p. 90. 74 Collingwood, Life and Letters, p. 94. 75 Quoted in Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 185. 76 Quoted in Stoffel, Lewis Carroll, p. 152. 77 Robson, Men in Wonderland, p. 185. 78 David L. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006 [1994], p. 115. 79 Carroll, Letters, pp. 1137–37n. In passing, in Ulysses James Joyce alludes to ‘a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during and after 2 months’ consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser (men’s 15/-, athlete’s 20/-)’, James Joyce, Ulysses, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 [1922], p. 642. 80 Joyce, Ulysses, p. 602. 81 Cohen, Lewis Carroll, p. 288. On physical culture see, for example, Michael Budd, The Sculpture Machine, New York: New York University Press, 1997 and Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 82 Chapman, Sandow, p. 115. 83 Thoreau, ‘Walking’. 84 Paul C. Adams, ‘Peripatetic imagery and peripatetic sense of place’, in Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. Till (eds), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, p. 194. 85 Gattégno, Lewis Carroll, p. 263. 86 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, in Complete Works, p. 37. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., p. 38. 89 Danuta Zadworna-Fjellestad, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Gravity’s Rainbow: A Study in Duplex Fiction, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1986, pp. 18–19. 90 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso, 1993, p. 53. 91 John Bale, Running Cultures: Racing in Time and Space, London: Routledge, 2004. 92 George Pitcher, ‘Wittgenstein, nonsense and Lewis Carroll’, Massachusetts Review, 6, 3, 1965, pp. 591–611. 93 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, in Complete Works, p. 38. 94 Blake, Play, Games and Sport, p. 115. 95 Shane Leslie, ‘Lewis Carroll and the Oxford Movement’, in Phillips (ed.), Aspects of Alice, pp. 211–219. 96 Greenacre, ‘From “The character of Dodgson”’, p. 322; Sundmark, Alice on the OralLiterary Continuum, pp. 90–91.

Notes 163 97 Richards, Imperial Archive, p. 53. 98 Blake, Play, Games and Sport, p. 114. 99 Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (trans. Ian Fraser), London: Ink Links, 1978; Bero Rigauer, Sport and Work (trans. Allen Guttmann), New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 100 Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990, pp. 54–55. 101 Ibid., p. 54. 102 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in Complete Works, p. 152. 103 Blake, Play, Games and Sport, p. 137. 104 Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Space and place: Humanist perspective’, Progress in Geography, 6, 1974, p. 227. 105 Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, in Complete Works, p. 566. 106 Ibid., p. 568. 107 Blake, Play, Games and Sport, p. 137. 108 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings (ed. Norbert Müller) Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000, p. 187. 109 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, in Complete Works, p. 89. 110 Ibid., pp. 90–91. 111 Ibid., p. 91. 112 Richards, Imperial Archive, pp. 54–55. 113 Sundmark, Alice on the Oral-Literary Continuum, pp. 90–99. 114 Blake, Play, Games and Sport, p. 125. 115 Quoted in The Philosopher’s Alice (introduction and notes by Peter Heath), London: Academy Editions, 1974, p. 82. 116 The Queen’s croquet has been used to illustrate the role of embedded expectations in the use (or non-use) of sports facilities. See Jan Ove Tangen, ‘Embedded expectations, embodied knowledge and the movements that connect’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 39, 1, 2004, pp. 7–25. 117 Quoted in Donald Rackin, ‘Laughing and grief: What’s so funny about Alice in Wonderland?’ in Edward Guiliano (ed.), Lewis Carroll Observed, New York: Clemson N. Potter, 1976, pp. 1–18. 118 Blake, Play, Games and Sport, p. 171. 119 Jacques Ehrmann, ‘Homo ludens revisited’, Yale French Studies, 14, 1968, p. 55. 120 Yi-Fu Tuan, Who am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, p. 102. 121 Sundmark, Alice on the Oral-Literary Continuum, pp. 53–55, 73. 122 Lewis Carroll, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, New York: Random House, 1936, p. 150. 123 U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘The balancing of child and adult: An approach to Victorian fantasies for children’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 37, 4, 1983, p. 511. 124 Jones and Gladstone, The Red King’s Dream, p. 195. 125 On the labyrinth and sport see Henning Eichberg, ‘Race track and labyrinth: The space of physical culture in Berlin’, Journal of Sport History, 17, 2, 1990, pp. 345–360. 126 Sharon Magnarelli, ‘Humor and games in El gato eficaz by Luisa Valenzula: The looking-glass world revisited’, Modern Language Studies, 13, 3, 1983, p. 86. 127 Carroll, ‘The Deserted Parks’ in Complete Works, p. 917. 128 Carroll, Diaries, p. 260. Lennon, in her Lewis Carroll, thought it was a ‘good parody’ of Goldsmith, p. 80. 129 Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994, pp. 29–30. 130 Carroll, ‘The Deserted Parks’, in Complete Works, p. 920. 131 Ibid. 132 Cohen, Lewis Carroll, p. 397.

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133 Jones and Gladstone, The Red King’s Dream, p. 33. 134 Precisely the opposite situation arose in R. C. Sheriff’s play Badger’s Green, written in 1930, in which protests in the village of Badger’s Green focus on the defence of the local cricket pitch that is faced by the threat of a housing development. Carroll saw the establishment of cricket as one of the banes of modernity; Sheriff saw the destruction of the pitch in exactly the same terms. 135 Carroll, Diaries, pp. 31–32; Collingwood, Life and Letters, p. 212. 136 Collingwood, p. 318. 137 Carroll, Letters, p. 977n. 138 Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, p. 286. 139 Ibid. 140 Lewis Carroll, ‘Some popular fallacies about vivisection’, in The Complete Works, pp. 1189–1201. On the literary representation of hunting and anti-hunting (in the pre-Carrollian period) see Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 141 Collingwood, Life and Letters, pp. 167–171. 142 Carroll, ‘Some popular fallacies’, p. 1193. 143 Ibid., p. 1195. 144 Ibid. 145 Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, p. 468. 146 Carroll, ‘Some popular fallacies’, p. 175. 147 Ibid. 148 John Bale, ‘The place of pain in running’, in Sigmund Loland, Berit Skirstad and Ivan Waddington (eds), Pain and Injury in Sport, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 65–75. 149 Taylor, The White Knight, p. 158. 150 Collingwood, Life and Letters, p. 168 151 On this historical shift in body-cultural practice see Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. 152 Cheryl Cole, ‘Addiction, exercise and cyborgs: Technologies of deviant bodies’, in Geneviève Rail (ed.), Sport and Postmodern Times, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, pp. 261–276. 153 Blake, Sport, Play and Games, p. 170. 154 Carroll, Letters, p. 203. 155 Carroll, Complete Works, pp. 1201–1202. 156 Carroll, Letters, p. 683n. 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid. 159 Hudson, Lewis Carroll, p. 240 160 Carroll, Complete Works, p. 1211. 161 Carroll, Diaries, vol. 8, p. 17. 162 Clark, Lewis Carroll, p. 217. 163 Collingwood, Life and Letters, p. 69. 164 Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, p. 597. 165 Edmund Miller, ‘The Sylvie and Bruno books as Victorian novel’, in Edward Guiliano (ed.), Lewis Carroll Observed, New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976, pp. 140–141. 166 Carroll, Complete Works, pp. 1269–1271. 167 Carroll, Diaries, pp. 196, 199, 245. 168 Hudson, Lewis Carroll, p. 152. 169 Charles Lovatt, Lewis Carroll and the Press, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999, p. 36. 170 Ibid., p. 299. 171 Ivars Peterson’s Mathland, www.maa.org/mathland/mathland_3_3.html 172 Blake, Play, Games and Sport.

Notes 165 173 Quoted in Hudson, Lewis Carroll, p. 90. 174 Hans Lenk and Gunter Gebauer, ‘Sport and sports literature from the perspective of methodological interpretation’, Aethlon, 5, 2, 1988, p. 83. 175 Zadworna-Flellestad, Alice’s Adventures, p. 38. 176 The slipperiness of the term ‘sport’ is further illustrated by the fact that Alice in Wonderland could itself, apparently, be called a sport. The word was used by critics in the nineteenth century for ‘oddities or hybrids’ of accepted literary forms. See Sundmark, Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum, p. 34. 3 Charles Hamilton Sorley 1 Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers, London: Heinemann, 1917, pp. 23–24. 2 Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Environment, behaviour, and thought’, in Frederick W. Boal and David N. Livingstone (eds), The Behavioural Environment: Essays in Reflection, Application and Re-evaluation, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 77. 3 W. H. Auden, ‘Runner’, in Garth Battista (ed.) The Runner’s Literary Companion, New York: Penguin, 1994, p. 294. 4 John Wylie, ‘A single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coastal Path’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 2, 2005, p. 235. 5 See, for example, J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, London: Frank Cass, [1981] 2000. 6 Ibid., p. 54, italics added. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, London: Macmillan, [1867] 1949. 10 F. A. M. Webster, Athletics, London: Allen and Unwin, 1925, p. 25. 11 Ibid. Webster combined his writing of numerous track and field manuals with adventure stories often with a colonial bent. 12 G. C. Beresford, Schooldays with Kipling, London: Gollancz, 1936, p. 61. 13 Webster, Athletics, p. 25. 14 Ibid., p. 64. 15 Kipling, ‘If’, in Battista, The Runner’s Literary Companion, p. 301. 16 Montague Shearman, Athletics and Football, London: Longmans, Green, 1888, pp. 213–214. 17 Harold B. Segal, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. 216. 18 Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 170. 19 Battista, The Runner’s Literary Companion, p. ix. 20 Ibid; Roger Robinson, Running in Literature, Halcottville, NY: Breakaway Books, 2003. 21 Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 16. 22 See, for example, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. 23 It is possible, of course, that the messages found in a writer’s letters are different in intent from those in his poems. In Sorley’s case it seems to me that there is a strong degree of congruence between both modes of representation. 24 Gunnar Olsson, Eggs in Bird/Bird in Eggs, London: Pion, 1980, pp. 12e–13e (italics added). 25 Among the few writers from sports studies who have experimented with writing in the way Olsson does is Syndy Sydnor, ‘A history of synchronized swimming’, Journal of Sport History, 25, 2, 1998, pp. 252–267. 26 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 103.

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27 Segal, Body Ascendant, p. 216. 28 See John H. Johnson, English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Biographies of Sorley are: Thomas Burnett Swann, The Ungirt Runner: Charles Hamilton Sorley, Poet of World War I, Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1965, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography, London: Cecil Woolfe, 1985. Other key writings are: John Press, ‘Charles Sorley’, A Review of English Literature, 7, 2, 1966, pp. 43–60, Anne Powell, ‘Two centenary salutes: Charles Hamilton Sorley and Robert Graves’, Gravesiana, 1, 1, 1996, pp. 21–32, and Hilda D. Spear, The Poems and Selected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley, Dundee: Blackness Press, 1978. Sorley’s collected works are found in the posthumously published Charles Hamilton Sorley, Marlborough and Other Poems (ed. William Ritchie Sorley), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916, and Charles Hamilton Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley (ed. William Ritchie Sorley with a chapter of biography by Janetta Sorley), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919. See also Jean Moorcroft Wilson, The Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley, London: Cecil Woolfe, 1985. Sorley’s reputation as a war poet is said to rest on his poems ‘To Germany’, ‘All the hills and vales along’ and ‘When you see millions of mouthless dead’: see Elizabeth Vandiver, ‘“Millions of mouthless dead”: Charles Hamilton Sorley and Wilfred Owen in Homer’s Hades’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5, 3, 1999, pp. 432–546. 29 Wilson, The Collected Poems, p. 31. 30 Ibid., p. 7. 31 Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War, p. 58. 32 Ibid. 33 Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p. 19. 34 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 25. 35 Ibid. 36 Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p. 19. 37 Ibid., p. 40. ‘Public’ in this context is a peculiar English euphemism. Such schools are, for the majority of students, fee-paying. 38 Ibid., p. 13. 39 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 35. Swann sometimes lapses into hyperbole, claiming at one point that Sorley was an ‘athlete equal to the best’. Ibid., p. 128. 40 Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p. 99. 41 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 61. Schools like Marlborough were divided into ‘houses’ for purposes of collegiality and intra-college sports competitions. They could also be seen as a form of social control through the idea of ‘divide and rule’. 42 Sorley, quoted in Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p, 44. 43 Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p. 44 44 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 45. 45 Ibid., p. 242 (letter to Mrs Sorley). 46 Sorley, Marlborough, p. 129. 47 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 36. 48 Sorley, Marlborough, p. 129. 49 Quoted in Press, ‘Charles Sorley’, 47. 50 Spear, Poems and Selected Letters, p. 14. 51 Sorley, Marlborough, p. 142. 52 Wilson, The Collected Poems, p, 14. 53 Sorley, Marlborough, p. 135. 54 Sorley, Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 71 (letter to A. E. Hutchinson, January 1914). 55 Ibid. 56 Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers, pp. 23–24. 57 Ibid.

Notes 167 58 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin, 1979; Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (trans. Ian Fraser), London: Ink Links, 1974; Bero Rigauer (trans. Allen Guttmann), Sport and Work, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 59 Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False, London: Faber, 1965, p. 81. 60 This de-emphasis on winning is repeated in ‘Ungirt runners’. And we known that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. 61 Quoted in Douglas Brown, ‘Modern sport, modernism and the cultural manifesto: De Coubertin’s Revue Olympique’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 18, 2, 2001, p. 95. Brown observes that this is hardly consistent with the Olympic motto, ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’. 62 Milan Kundera, Slowness, (trans. Linda Asher), London: Faber and Faber, 1966, pp. 4–5. 63 Jan Culik, ‘Milan Kundera’, www.artsgla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Kundera/htm (accessed 26 March 2007). 64 Sigmund Loland, ‘The logic of progress and the art of moderation in competitive sports’, in Torbjörn Tännsjö (ed.), Values in Sport, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 39–56. 65 Shearman, Athletics and Football, pp. 212–213. 66 Spear, Poems and Selected Letters, p. 14. 67 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 22 (letter to his parents, October 1912). 68 Ibid (letter to his parents, May 1913). 69 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 38. 70 Spear, Poems and Selected Letters, p. 14. 71 MacNeice, The Strings are False, p. 86. 72 Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time; Rigauer, Sport and Work. 73 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 102 (letter to A. N. G. Peters, a school colleague). 74 Loland, ‘The logic of progress’. 75 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 63. 76 Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, p. 193. 77 Italics added. 78 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 144 (italics added). 79 Robinson, Running in Literature, p. 180. 80 Press, ‘Charles Sorley’, p. 46. 81 Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 83. 82 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 144. On the garden as a ‘tamed’ landscape see Yi-Fu Tuan, Domination and Affection: The Making of Pets, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 83 The poem continues in a less romantic vein but it is clear that from running Sorley is able to take in the visual as well as the tactile pleasures of the landscape. 84 Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages (trans. Sierry Weber Nicholson), Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, p. 87. 85 Robert Reinehart, ‘Born-again sport: Ethics in biographical research’, in Geneviève Rail (ed.), Sport and Postmodern Times, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 43. 86 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 144. 87 Spear, Poems and Selected Letters, p. 86. 88 Swann, The Ungirt Runner, p. 67; Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 81. 89 Ibid., p. 173 (letter to his parents, May 1914). 90 Ibid., p. 76 (letter to A. E. Hutchinson, January 1914). 91 Ibid. 92 Press, ‘Charles Sorley’, p. 49.

168

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93 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 86. 94 Quoted in Spear, Poems and Selected Letters, p. 86 (letter to the Master of Marlborough College, February 1914). 95 Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p. 19. 96 Sorley, Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 256 (letter to A. R. Gidney). 97 Ibid. 98 Sorley, Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 252 (letter to Master of Marlborough). 99 Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, p. 33. 100 Sorley, Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 282 (letter to the Master of Marlborough). 101 Ibid., p. 228 (letter to Mrs Sorley). 102 Andrew Blake, The Body Language: The Meaning of Modern Sport, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996, p. 189. 103 Ibid., p. 172. On Houseman’s well known poem see John Bale, Running Cultures: Racing in Time and Space, London: Routledge, 2004. 104 Roger Bannister, First Four Minutes, London: Putnam’s, 1955, p. 218. See also John Bale, ‘Scientific and romantic: The rhetorics of the first four-minute mile’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 21, 1, 2004, pp. 120–128 and John Bale, Roger Bannister and the Four Minute Mile, London: Routledge, 2004. 105 Sorley, Marlborough, pp. 131–132. Sorley seems likely to be referring to Masefield’s ‘The Racer’, a short poem that finds more sympathy from Robinson, Running in Literature, pp. 183–184. 106 Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, p. 38 (letter to his parents, October 1912). 107 See, for example, Jim Denison, ‘Sport narratives’, Qualitative Enquiry, 2, 3, 1996, pp. 351–362. 4 Jerome K. Jerome 1 Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Ideas in 1905, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905, p. 60. 2 Ruth Marie Faurot, Jerome K. Jerome, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974, pp. 189–192. 3 Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926, p. 30. 4 Ibid., p. 215. 5 Ibid., p. 34. 6 Quoted in Alfred Moss, Jerome: His Life and Work, London: Selwyn and Blount, 1928, p. 72. 7 Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 48. 8 Ibid., p. 49. 9 Jerome K. Jerome, Paul Kelver, London: Hutchinson, 1902. 10 To-Day, 13, 169, 1896, p. 428. 11 One of Jerome’s biographers stated that Jerome wrote a series of articles and editorial notes for the magazine: Moss, Jerome, p. 96. 12 Ibid., p. 95. 13 Ibid., p. 102. 14 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, London: Arrowsmith, 1889. 15 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, London: Arrowsmith, 1900: ibid p. 258. A Bummel, Jerome explained, ‘is a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started’. 16 Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 48. 17 Ibid., p. 60. 18 Ibid., p. 188. 19 Ibid., p. 35. 20 Ibid., p. 214. 21 Ibid., p. 195.

Notes 169 22 Joseph Connolly, Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography, London: Orbis, 1992, p. 152., Other biographical studies include Faurot, Jerome K. Jerome and Moss, Jerome. 23 Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1924. See also Peter Lovesey, ‘Conan Doyle and the Olympics’, Journal of Olympic History, 10, 2001, pp. 6–9. 24 J. Wood and R. J. Maughan, ‘Famous sporting photographs: There’s more than meets the eye’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 33, 1999, pp. 54–55. 25 Jerome K. Jerome, To-Day, 1, 11, 1894, p. 18. 26 To-Day, 11, 131, 1896, p. 12. 27 Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 84. 28 Ibid. 29 Anon. (but most probably Jerome), ‘The 24 hours cycle record’, To-Day, 1, 1, 1893, p. 27. 30 To-Day, 1, 5, 1893, p. 9. 31 Anon., To-Day, 1, 6, 1893, p. 22. The French cyclist, Lucien Lesna was misspelled as ‘Lesne’. 32 John Hoberman, Mortal Engines, New York: The Free Press, p. 80–81. 33 For an overview see John Bale, Sports Geography (second edn), London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 30–33. A detailed case study is Richard Pollard, ‘Worldwide regional variations in home advantage in association football’, Journal of Sport Sciences, 24, 3, 2006, pp. 231–240. 34 Jerome, To-day, 8, 104, 1895, p. 405. 35 Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, pp. 224–225. 36 Ibid., p. 227. 37 Norbert Elias, The Germans, Cambridge: Polity, 1996, p. 50ff. 38 Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 198. For an extended observation of the Mensur see Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, pp. 225–233. 39 Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 199. 40 Ibid., p. 198. 41 Mika LaVaque-Manty, ‘Dueling for equality: Masculine honor and the modern politics of dignity’, Political Theory, 34, 6, 2006, pp. 715–740. 42 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Eric Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization, London: Routledge, 1999. 43 Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, pp. 123–125, italics added. 44 Ibid., p. 124. 45 Ibid., p. 169. 46 Jerome, Idle Ideas. 47 Ibid., p. 60. 48 Jerome, ‘A lay in the links’, To-Day, 1, 1, 1893, p. 26. 49 Ibid., p. 60. 50 Jerome, My Life and Times, pp. 218–219. 51 Ibid., p. 23. 52 Ibid., p. 214. 53 Ibid., p. 227. 54 Ibid., p. 226. 55 Ibid., p. 214. 56 Ibid., p. 219. 57 Jerome, Idle Ideas, p. 62. 58 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, p. 326. 59 Jerome, Idle Ideas, p. 64. 60 Ibid., p. 65. 61 Ibid., p. 66.

170

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62 Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 199. 63 The disqualification of the marathon runner Dorando Pietri was witnessed by Coubertin who declared him the ‘moral winner’: see Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings (ed. Norbert Müller), Lausanne: IOC, 2000, p. 417. 64 Ibid., p. 196. 65 Ibid., p. 183. 66 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, p. 158. 67 K. V. Meier, ‘Embodiment, sport and meaning’, quoted in John Hughson, David Inglis and Marcus Free, The Uses of Sport: A Critical Study, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 138. 68 Jerome, Idle Ideas, p. 217. 69 Connolly, Jerome K. Jerome, p. 152. 70 Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, ‘Possible geographies: a passing encounter in a café’, Area, 38, 4, 2006, p. 355. 71 Jerome, Idle Ideas, pp. 71–72. Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was a French artist best known for his landscape paintings. 72 See John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, London: Leicester University Press, 1994, pp. 72–75. 73 Quoted in James Coleman, ‘Athletics in high school’, Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science, 338, 1961, pp. 33–43. 74 Jerome K. Jerome, The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1898, pp. 245–270. 75 Ibid., pp. 259, 254. 76 Ibid., pp. 257–258. 77 Ibid., p. 259. 78 Jerome K. Jerome, The Angel and the Author – Plus Others, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1908. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Jerome K. Jerome, The Diary of a Pilgrimage, Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1891, pp. 259–280. 82 Ibid., p. 266. 83 Ibid., p. 267. 84 Arlen Blum, ‘A Briton in Russia’, New Times, Dec., 2005: www.newtimes.ru/eng/ detail.asp?art_id=878 (accessed January 13 2006). 85 Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, New York: Penguin, [1924] 1993. See Elizabeth StenbockFermor, ‘A neglected source of Zamiatin’s novel “We”’, The Russian Review, 32, 2, 1973, pp. 187–188. 86 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, London: Dent, 1907, pp. 2–3. 87 Jerome, The Diary of a Pilgrimage, p. 269. 88 Zamyatin, We, p. 13. ‘Taylor’ refers to Frederick Winslow Taylor, often regarded as the ‘father of scientific management’ and of time and motion studies. His ideas have been applied metaphorically to sports training by, for example, Bero Rigauer, Sport and Work (trans. Allen Guttmann), New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 89 Jerome, The Diary of a Pilgrimage, p. 271. 90 Ibid., p. 272. 91 Ibid., p. 279. 92 Ibid., p. 277. 93 Ibid., p. 277. 94 Ibid., p. 274, emphasis in original. 95 Petr Roubal, ‘Politics of gymnastics: Mass gymnastic displays under Communism in Central and Eastern Europe’, Body and Society, 9, 2, 2003, pp. 1–25. 96 Ibid., p. 4. 97 Ibid., p. 8.

Notes 171 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

John Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology, London: Heinemann, 1984, p. 211. To-Day, 8, 99, 1895, p. 241. Ibid. To-Day, 12, 149, 1896, p. 178. To-Day, 8, 99, 1895, p. 241. Coubertin, Olympism. Ibid., p. 301. To-Day, 16, 198, 1895, p. 71. To-Day, 11, 139, 1896, p. 274. To-Day, 10, 126, 1896, p. 276. To-Day, 9, 111, 1895, p. 210. To-Day, 9, 117, 1896, p. 402. Ibid. To-Day, 12, 144, 1896, p. 26. Ibid., p. 49. To-Day, 6, 75, 1895, p. 310. To-Day, 11, 143, 1896, p. 407. To-Day, 12, 144, 1896, p. 26. To-Day, 11, 141, 1896, p. 333 To-Day, 16, 200, 1897, p. 156. Ibid., p. 250. To-Day, 16, 203, 1897, p. 248. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Boston: Beacon Press, 1950, p. 197. To-Day, 15, 193, 1897, p. 373. Ibid. ‘Pace-making as a profession’, To-Day, 12, 146, 1896, p. 69. See, for example, Adolphe Abrahams and Harold Abrahams, Training for Athletics, London: Bell, 1929. For a more recent approach see John Bale, ‘Amateurism, capital and Roger Bannister’, Sport in History, 26, 3, 2006, pp. 484–501. To-Day, 8, 102, 1895, p. 338. D. J. Taylor, On the Corinthian Spirit, London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2006, p. 69. Quoted in Douglas Brown, ‘The sensual and intellectual pleasures of rowing: Pierre de Coubertin’s ideal for modern sport’, Sport History Review, 30, 1999, p. 109. Jerome, My Life and Times, p. 229. Quoted in Taylor, On the Corinthian Spirit, p. 81. Ibid. To be fair, the UK press hardly overdid it with their coverage of the Athens Olympics. The Times carried only one-and-a-half columns.

5 John Betjeman 1 John Betjeman, ‘Hertfordshire’, in Collected Poems (ed. Earl of Birkenhead), London: John Murray, 1958, p. 267. 2 Betjeman, ‘The Olympic Girl’, in Collected Poems, p. 222. 3 Earl of Birkenhead, ‘Introduction’, Collected Poems, p. xxiii. 4 John Betjeman, Coming Home: An Anthology of Prose (ed. Candida Lycett Green), London: Methuen, 1997, p. 340. 5 John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells, London: John Murray, 1960 [1976], p. 43. The 1976 edition was the first to include ‘Cricket Master’. 6 Ibid., p. 107. 7 John Press, John Betjeman, London: Longmans, 1966. Other books on Betjeman include Derek Stanford, John Betjeman, London: Neville Spearman, 1961; Bevis Hillier, Young Betjeman, London: Cardinal, 1989; Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love, London: John Murray, 2002; Bevis Hillier, Betjeman: The Bonus of

172

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Notes Laughter, London: John Murray, 2004; John Betjeman, Letters (ed. Candida Lycett Green), 2 vols, London: Methuen, 1994 and 1995; Patrick Taylor-Martin, John Betjeman, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984; Dennis Brown, John Betjeman, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999; A. N. Wilson, Betjeman, London: Hutchinson, 2006; Margaret Stapleton, Sir John Betjeman: A Bibliography of Writings By and About Him, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974 (includes an essay by Ralph J. Mills, ‘John Betjeman’s poetry: An appreciation’, pp. 1–23). On Hillier’s monumental efforts see Brooke Allen, ‘Betjeman: A “whim of iron”’, The New Criterion, 23, 7, 2005, pp. 10–18. Quoted in Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 40 Betjeman, Summoned by Bells, p. 68. Ibid., p. 67 (italics added). Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 96. Hillier, Betjeman, p. 84. Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 360. On Betjeman’s interest in railways and trains see Jonathan Glancey, John Betjeman on Trains, London: Methuen, 2006. Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 101. Ibid., p. 102. The slogan underneath the image was ‘Upon Philistia will I triumph’. Ibid., p. 132. These words are taken from a short play written by Betjeman while at Oxford: see Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 190. Hillier, Young Betjeman, pp. 55, 7. Wilson, Betjeman, p. 38. C. M. Bowra, Memories 1898–1939, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966, p. 166. Quoted in Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 185. Ibid., p. 131. John Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest, London: John Miles, 1953, p. 37. Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 128. Wilson, Betjeman, p. 50. Quoted in Roger Robinson, Running in Literature, Halcottville, NY: Breakaway Books, 2003, p. 154. Wilson, Betjeman, p. 70. Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 226; Betjeman, Summoned by Bells, p. 110. Betjeman, ‘Cricket Master’, Collected Poems, p. 362. See also Summoned by Bells, pp. 111–115. Paul Miller, quoted in Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 238. Vera Moule, quoted in Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 239. Andrew Geddes, ‘To be with John Betjeman was to enter another world’, The Spectator, 20 January. 2007, pp. 18–19. The versions of this story in Summoned by Bells and in Young Betjeman differ slightly: see p. 114 and p. 232 respectively. In the poem Barnstaple is used as a nom de plume for Huxtable. Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 44. These juvenile japes confirm the view that in his early twenties Betjeman ‘was still emotionally a mere boy’: Timothy Mowl, Stylistic Cold Wars, London: John Murray, 2000, p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 225. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., pp. 287–288. Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 372. Betjeman, Coming Home, p. 239. Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 372. Ibid.

Notes 173 44 Nick Ford and David Brown, Surfing and Social Theory, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 162. 45 Ibid., p. 160. A BBC film on John Betjeman (screened on BBC TV on 14 August 2006) showed him with his friends surfing, laying face downward on the board, near Padstow (Cornwall) in the 1950s or 1960s. 46 Betjeman, Coming Home, p. 239. 47 Geddes, ‘To be with John Betjeman’, p. 18. 48 Quoted in Hillier, New Fame, New Love, p. 453. 49 Mowl, Stylistic Cold Wars, p. 96. 50 John Betjeman, First and Last Loves, London: John Murray, 1969 [1952], p. 5. 51 Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest, p. 37. 52 Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 23. 53 Ibid., p. 7. 54 John Betjeman, A Nip in the Air, London: John Murray, 1974, p. 45. 55 Taylor-Martin, John Betjeman, p. 61. 56 Mowl, Stylistic Cold Wars, p. 61. 57 John Betjeman, ‘City and Suburbia’, The Spectator, 28 January 1955, p. 96. 58 Betjeman, Letters, vol. 2, p. 4. 59 Betjeman, ‘City and Suburbia’, p. 96. 60 Peter Gammond, The Little Book of Betjeman, Cirencester, Guidon, 2006, p. 36. 61 Hillier, Betjeman, p. 9. 62 Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 508. 63 Betjeman, Collected Poems, pp. 250–252 and 236–237 respectively. On this poem see Derek Stanford, ‘Mr Betjeman’s satire’, The Contemporary Review, 197, 1960, pp. 286–289. 64 Ibid. 65 Betjeman, Collected Poems, pp. 250–252. 66 Hillier, John Betjeman, pp. 178–180. 67 Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 440 (letter to Roland Pym). 68 Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 105. 69 Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 228 (letter to Geoffrey Grigson). 70 Ibid., p. 315 (letter to Myfanwy Piper). 71 Hillier, John Betjeman, p. 107. 72 Betjeman, ‘Myfanwy’, Collected Poems, p. 86. 73 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, London: Corgi, 1961. 74 See Hillier, Young Betjeman, pp. 221–234. 75 Ibid., p. 227. 76 Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 233. 77 Ibid., pp. 57–58. ‘Patsy’ Hendren was an English international cricketer and mention of him (and C. B. Fry – see below) suggests that Betjeman was aware of at least some contemporary sporting heroes. Another hero to whom he referred was the long-distance swimmer Captain Webb in his mysterious poem about Webb’s ghost, ‘A Shropshire Lad’. On this subject see Taylor-Martin, John Betjeman, p. 79. 78 Nabokov, Lolita, p. 244. 79 Betjeman, Collected Poems, pp. 222–224. 80 Michael Cameron Andrews, ‘Betjeman’s Senex’, The Explicator, 43, 3, 1985, p. 40. 81 Wilson, Betjeman, p. 143. Betjeman, ‘Senex’, Collected Poems, pp. 86–87. 82 Leena Kore Schröder, ‘Heterotopian constructions of Englishness in the work of John Betjeman’, Critical Survey, 10, 2, 1988, p. 30. 83 Apparently, in writing this naughty little verse, Betjeman was assisted by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNiece: see Hillier, John Betjeman, p. 35. 84 Betjeman, Collected Poems, pp. 86–87. 85 Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 446 (letter to William Plomer). 86 Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 105.

174 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118

Notes Quoted in Hillier, Young Betjeman, p. 229. Betjeman, Letters, vol. 1, p. 377. Betjeman, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 79, 83. Betjeman, ‘Senex’, Collected Poems, p. 93. Hillier, Betjeman, p. 72. Betjeman, Letters, vol. 2, p. 135. For example: ‘The sports girl’s strength in Betjeman’s poems frequently carries overtones of the nurse or governess, rendering her an ambivalent figure of “lowness” in employment of the male’s family, as well as a figure of maternal comfort and power’: Schröder, ‘Heterotopian constructions’, p. 31. Nabokov, Lolita. On the place of tennis in Lolita see Julia Bader, Crystal Land, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, pp. 68–69, and William Woodin Rowe, Nabakov’s Deceptive World, New York: New York University Press, 1971, pp. 144–146. Jocelyn Brooke, Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman, London: Longmans, 1962, p. 28. Betjeman, ‘Beside the Seaside’, Collected Poems, p. 149. Queried in Hillier, Betjeman, p. 617. Betjeman, ‘Beside the Seaside’, Collected Poems, p. 149. Hugo Williams, The Guardian (Review), 25 February, 2006, p. 8. Celia Brackenridge, Spoilsports, London: Spon, 2000. See also Toby Miller, Sportsex, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. In Stapleton, Sir John Betjeman, p. 2. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976; Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995. Betjeman, First and Last Loves, p. 3. Roger Bannister, First Four Minutes, London: Putnam’s, 1955, p. 103. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas), Boston: Beacon Press, [1958] 1974, p. 19; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974, p. 93. W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’, in John Betjeman, Slick but not Streamlined, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947, pp. 9–16. I should add that in his biography of Betjeman, Patrick Taylor-Martin (John Betjeman, pp. 75–105) devoted a chapter to topophilia. For a critique of ‘topophilia’ – or at least a ‘sense of place’ – see Gillian Rose, ‘Place and identity: a sense of place’, in Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (eds), A Place in the World: Places, Cultures and Globalization, Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1995, pp. 87–129. Auden, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 12, 14. John Betjeman, High and Low, London: John Murray, 1966, p. 67. Fred Inglis, ‘Intellectual history and popular culture: The case of sports’, Bulletin, British Society of Sports History, 12, 1992, p. 17. John Betjeman, The Best of Betjeman (collector, John Guest), London: John Murray, 1978, p. 52. Fry was a polymath sportsman, outstanding at cricket, athletics and football. Bowra claimed that he was ‘the greatest athlete of his age’ but ‘he believed that dancing and singing were better training for the body than physical drill’, Bowra, Memories, pp. 142–143. Stanford, John Betjeman, p. 35. Betjeman Collected Poems, p. 27. Mowl, Stylistic Cold Wars, pp. 11–12. Betjeman, First and Last Loves, p. 67. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, pp. 149–165. Simon Inglis, The Football Grounds of England and Wales, London: Willow Books, 1983. See also Simon Inglis, Sightlines: A Stadium Odyssey, London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2000. Betjeman’s avoidance of sports is noted in Stanford, John Betjeman, p. 36.

Notes 175 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158

Betjeman, First and Last Loves, p. 67. Ibid. The architecture of stadiums is examined in Inglis, Football Grounds. Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 181. Betjeman, The Best of Betjeman, p. 221. Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 196. Mowl, Stylistic Cold Wars, p. 153. Betjeman, First and Last Loves, p. 69. Ibid. John Bale, Sport, Space and the City, Caldwell, NJ: Blackburn Press, 2001 [1993], p. 137. Betjeman, First and Last Loves, p. 70. Hillier, Young Betjeman. John Betjeman, ‘City and Suburbia’, The Spectator, 28 July, 1955, p. 102. Hillier, John Betjeman, p. 434. His daughter confirmed Betjeman as a lone golfer who ‘played usually on his own while [she] trailed behind looking for balls in the rough’: Betjeman, Letters, vol. 2, p. 63. Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 195. Ibid., p. 333. Betjeman, Collected Poems, p. 207. Betjeman, The Best of Betjeman, p. 229. Brooke, Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman, p. 41. Taylor-Martin, John Betjeman, p. 77. Betjeman Collected Poems, p. 299. Ibid., p. 101. On the variety of oppositional voices relating to the development of golf in an earlier period see John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Class, 1870–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. John Bale, ‘A geographical theory of sport’, in Verner Møller and John Nauright (eds), The Essence of Sport, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003, pp. 81–92. Ibid. Betjeman, Collected Poems , p. 169. Betjeman was very active in a campaign against the erection of concrete lamp posts in the early 1950s: Betjeman, Letters, vol. 2, p. 12. It is difficult to know what he would have felt about the growth of the floodlighting of sports events (light pollution) that would come to be seen as (b)lighting residential areas adjacent to football grounds. Paul Weiss, Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry, Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1969, p. 105. Betjeman, ‘The Town Clerk’s View’, Collected Poems, p. 166, italics in original. Taylor-Martin, John Betjeman, p. 92. At least, according to 1930s intellectuals such as F. R. Leavis: see John Hughson, David Inglis and Marcus Free, The Uses of Sport: A Critical Study, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 16. Betjeman, First and Last Loves, p. 10. Ibid., p. 12. Augé, Non-Places, pp. 77–78. Schröder, ‘Heterotopian constructions of Englishness’, pp. 15–34. Ibid., p. 17. Brooke, Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman, p. 42. Schröder, ‘Heterotopian constructions of Englishness’, p. 18. John Sparrow, Independent Essays, London: Faber and Faber, 1963, p. 166. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Andover: Tavistock, 1970. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London: Routledge, 1997; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, pp. 182–196.

176 159 160 161 162

Notes Hetherington, Badlands, p. 51. Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest, p. 98 (italics added). Guttmann, The Erotic in Sport. Jean Williams, ‘Literature’, in Richard Cox, Grant Jarvie and Wray Vamplew (eds), Encyclopaedia of British Sport, London: Frank Cass, 2000, p. 226.

6 Alan Sillitoe 1 Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, London: Flamingo, 1994 [1959], p. 44. 2 For overviews of Alan Sillitoe’s life and work see: Allen Penner, Alan Sillitoe, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972; Ronald Dee Vaverka, Commitment as Art: A Marxist Critique of a Selection of Alan Sillitoe’s Political Fiction, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1978; Stanley Atherton, Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment, London: W. H. Allen, 1979; Gillian Hanson, Understanding Alan Sillitoe, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999; Alan Sillitoe, Life without Armour: An Autobiography, London: Flamingo, 1996. Note also a shorter recent review: James Campbell, ‘Conflict zones’, The Guardian, 3 April 2004. For a feminist perspective see Susan J. Leonardi, ‘The long-distance runner (the loneliness, loveliness, nunliness of)’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 13, 1, 1994, pp. 57–85. 3 Roger Robinson, Running in Literature, Halcottsville, NY: Breakaway Books, 2000, p. 227. Robinson thinks Brian Glanville’s The Olympian and Tom MacNab’s The Fast Man are better. 4 Melvin D. Palmer, ‘The sports novel: Mythic heroes and natural man’, Quest, 19, 1973, p. 57. 5 Atherton, Alan Sillitoe, p. 106. 6 John Hughson, ‘Audio visual review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 39, 2, 2004, pp. 235–250. 7 Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. 8 Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (trans. Ian Fraser), London: Ink Links, 1975; Bero Rigauer, Sport and Work (trans. Allen Guttmann), New York: Columbia University Press, 1981; Gerhard Vinnai, Football Mania (trans. David Fernbach and Martin Gillard), London: Ocean Books, 1973. 9 My brief summary of Marxist and neo-Marxist sports draws on Allen Guttmann’s ‘Introduction’ to Rigauer, Sport and Work, pp. vii–xxxi. 10 Respectively Harry H. Moore, ‘Preface’, in Charles Shapiro (ed.), Contemporary British Novelists, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, p. xi, and Saul Maloff, ‘The eccentricity of Alan Sillitoe’, Ibid., p. 97. 11 M. Lafranc, ‘Alan Sillitoe: An interview’, Études Anglaises, 26, 1, 1973, pp. 35–48. 12 On Sillitoe’s Nottingham see Stephen Daniels and Simon Rycroft, ‘Mapping the modern city: Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham novels’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18, 1993, pp. 460–480. 13 Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, p. 34. 14 Vaverka, Commitment as Art. 15 Ibid. 16 Alan Sillitoe, Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays by Alan Sillitoe, London: W. H. Allen, 1975, p. 84. 17 Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, p. 79. Sillitoe has had a lifelong love of geography. See Daniels and Rycroft, ‘Mapping the modern city’ and Sillitoe’s essay on ‘Maps’ in Mountains and Caverns, pp. 59–73. 18 Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, p. 82. 19 Ibid., p. 85. 20 Ibid., p. 176. 21 D. J. Taylor, ‘Put out the pipe please’, The Guardian, 6 December 2003.

Notes 177 22 Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, p. 233. 23 On amateurism and athletics during this period see Martin Polley, ‘“The amateur rules”: Amateurism and professionalism in post-war British athletics’, in Adrian Smith and Dilwyn Porter (eds), Amateurs and Professionals in Post-War British Sport, London: Frank Cass, 2000, pp. 81–114. 24 John Helperin, ‘Interview with Alan Sillitoe’, Modern Fiction Studies, 25, 2, 1979, pp. 175–189. 25 John A. Byars, ‘The initiation of Alan Sillitoe’s long-distance runner’, Modern Fiction Studies, 22, 4, 1976, p. 584. 26 John A. Slack, ‘A sporting chance: Sports delinquency and rehabilitation in “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, Aethlon, 17, 2, 2000, p. 2. 27 Robert Zeller, ‘Running away: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” revisited’, Aethlon, 13, 1, 1995, p. 50. 28 Byars, ‘The initiation’, p. 584. 29 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 7. 30 Ibid., p. 51. 31 Byars, ‘The initiation’, p. 590. 32 Quoted in Amby Burfoot, The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life, New York: Rodale, 2000, p. 66. 33 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 11. 34 Martyn Bowden, ‘Jerusalem, Dover Beach, and King’s Cross: Imagined places as metaphors for the British class struggle in Chariots of Fire and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, in Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn (eds), Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, Lanham, Mass: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, p. 77. On differences between the novella and the film see Janet Buck Rollins, ‘Novel into Film. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 9, 1981, pp. 172–188. See also John Hughson, ‘The “Loneliness” of the Angry Young Sportsman’, Film and History, 35, 2, 2005, pp. 41–48. 35 Andrew Higson, ‘Space, place, spectacle: Landscape and townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” film’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 1996, pp. 135–156. 36 Sillitoe, Loneliness, pp. 18–19. Represented here as a poem by Serge Fenoulière, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: From the Film and Back Again, www.discip.crdp.ac-caen.fr/anglais/documents/sill5AA0.htm (accessed 29 November 2001). 37 Sophia B. Blaydes and Philip Bordinat, ‘Blake’s “Jerusalem” and popular culture: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Chariots of Fire’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 11, 1983, pp. 211–214. For more on ‘Jerusalem’ in the film version of Loneliness see Bowden, ‘Jerusalem, Dover Beach, and King’s Cross’. 38 Blaydes and Bordinat, ‘Blake’s “Jerusalem”’. 39 Ibid., p. 214. 40 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 12. 41 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin, 1979. 42 Sillitoe, The Loneliness, p. 8. 43 In Sport Brohm notes: ‘... sport is perhaps the social practice which best exemplifies the “disciplinary society”, analysed by M. Foucault’, p. 18n. 44 Juha Heikkala, ‘Discipline and excel: Techniques of the self and body and the logic of competition’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 10, 1993, p. 399. 45 Ibid., p. 401. 46 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 44, italics added. 47 Hanson, Understanding Alan Sillitoe, p. 43. 48 Fenoulière, The Loneliness. 49 Alan Sillitoe, ‘Sport and Nationalism’ in Mountains and Caverns, p. 88.

178

Notes

50 James Gindin, ‘Alan Sillitoe’s jungle’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4, 1, 1962, pp. 35–48. 51 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 52 Sillitoe, Loneliness, pp. 43–44. 53 Peter Harcourt, ‘I’d rather be like I am’, Sight and Sound, 32, 1, 1962/1963, pp. 16–19. 54 Billy Ehn, ‘National feeling in sport: The case of Sweden’, Ethnologia Europea, 19, 1, 1988, pp. 57–66; Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, London: Sage, 1995. 55 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 10. 56 Ibid., p. 13, italics added. 57 Ibid., p. 10. 58 Slack, ‘A sporting chance’, p. 3. 59 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 7, italics added. 60 Zeller, ‘Running away’. 61 Wiliam Hutchings, ‘The work of play: Anger and the expropriated athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33, 1, 1987, p. 37. 62 John Dennis Hurrell. ‘Alan Sillitoe and the serious novel’, Critique, 4, 1, 1960/1961, p. 12. 63 Taylor, ‘Put out the pipe please’. 64 Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, p. 167. 65 Atherton, Alan Sillitoe, p. 106. 66 Hutchings, ‘The work of play’, p. 36. 67 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 132. 68 Ibid., p. 130. 69 Ibid. 70 See, for example, D. Randall Smith, ‘The home advantage revisited: Winning and crowd support in an era of national publics’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 27, 4, 2003, pp. 346–371. 71 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 126. 72 Hartwig Isernhagen, ‘The thematic unity of the Long-Distance Runner: The short story as a semi-qualified medium of social criticism’, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 12, 3, 1979, p. 181. 73 Norma Phillips, ‘Sillitoe’s “The Match” and its Joycean Counterparts’, Studies in Short Fiction, 12, 1, 1975, pp. 9–14. 74 R. Coles, ‘Football as a “surrogate” religion’, in R. Hill (ed.), A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, 8, London: SCM Press, 1975. 75 Phillips, ‘Sillitoe’s “The Match”, p. 12. 76 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 129. 77 Ibid., p. 129. 78 Hanson, Understanding Alan Sillitoe, p. 98. 79 Sillitoe, Loneliness, 129. 80 Hutchings, ‘The work of play’, p. 36. 81 Alan Sillitoe, Mountains and Caverns, pp. 84–88. 82 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 111. It is possible that, given his lack of interest in serious running, Sillitoe was unaware that ‘professionalism’ barely existed in any open form in late 1950s Britain though there was a considerable amount of ‘shamateurism’. Sillitoe’s lack of sporting knowledge may have also been exposed by his apparent unawareness that cross-country racing is a team sport in which the winning team is the one with the lowest number of points, calculated by adding together the finishing positions of each team’s members. Ruxton Towers could still have ‘won’ if Smith had lost or withdrawn. Without the team withdrawing and, in so doing, nullifying the race as a representational event, his action seems a rather hollow gesture. Smith gains revenge but not revolution. 83 Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, p. 156. 84 Sillitoe, Mountains and Caverns, p. 84.

Notes 179 85 The definitive work on this disaster is Simon Reeve, One Day in September, London: Faber, 2000. 86 Sillitoe, Mountains and Caverns, p. 88. 87 Ibid. 88 The ‘sportisation’ of mountaineering is described in Peter Donnelly, ‘Playing with gravity: Mountains and mountaineering’, in Patricia Vertinsky and John Bale (eds), Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 131–144. 89 Alan Sillitoe, Key to the Door, London: W. H. Allen, 1961. Brian Seaton is the brother of Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 90 Quoted in Vaverka, Commitment as Art, p. 95. 91 Heikkala, ‘Discipline and excel’, p. 411. 92 Michel Leiris, Rules of the Game, vol. 2, Scraps (trans. Lydia Davis), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1955], p. 111. 93 Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991, p. 326. 94 Ibid. 95 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 9, italics added. 96 Ibid., p. 10. 97 Ibid., p. 60, italics added. 98 Ibid., p. 13. 99 Vaverka, Commitment to Art, p. 61. 100 Ibid. 101 Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 23. 102 On Tupper and Wilson see Bale, Running Cultures, pp. 122–125. 103 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 66. 104 This question is raised in Hurrell, ‘Alan Sillitoe and the serious novel’, pp. 3–16. 105 Hanson, Understanding Alan Sillitoe, p. 42. 106 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 15. 107 Bowden, ‘Jerusalem, Dover Beach and King’s Cross’; Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, p. 61. 108 Quoted in Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (2nd edn) London: Tauris, 2002, p. 196. 109 Jeffrey Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, p. 71. 110 Vaverka, Commitment to Art, p. 69. 111 Fenoulière, The Loneliness. 112 Hughson, ‘Audio visual review’, p. 247. 113 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 44. 114 Hughson, ‘Audio visual review’, p. 247. 115 Vaverka, Commitment to Art, p. 61. 116 Halperin, ‘Interview’, p. 183. Sillitoe’s left-wing credentials are confirmed by his contributions to The New Left Review and to Anarchy. 117 Steven Connor, ‘“My fortieth year had come and gone and I still throwing [sic] the javelin”: Beckett’s athletics’, Static, 1, 2005, http:static.londonconsortium.com/ issue01/connor_beckett.html (accessed 14 November 2005). 118 Ibid. 119 Maloff, ‘The eccentricity of Alan Sillitoe’, p. 97. 120 Jeff Ferrell, ‘Against the law: Anarchist criminology’, Social Anarchism, 25, 1998. http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/en/display/127 (accessed 14 February 2007). 121 Isernhagen, ‘The thematic unity’, p. 187. 122 Sillitoe, Loneliness, p. 53. 123 Ibid., p. 58. 124 Atherton, Alan Sillitoe, p. 107. 125 Ibid., p. 178.

180 126 127 128 129 130

Notes Vaverka, Commitment to Art, p. 68. Hanson, Understanding Alan Sillitoe, p. 44. Slack, ‘A sporting chance’, p. 7. Ibid. Allen Penner, ‘Human dignity and social anarchy: Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”’, Contemporary Literature, 10, 2, 1969, p. 254.

7 Philip Roth 1 Philip Roth, The Great American Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 14. 2 Claudia Roth Pierpoint, ‘The great enemy’, The New Yorker, 5, 1, 2006, www.newyorker.com/printable/critics/06051crbo_books (accessed 31 July 2006). 3 Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 17. 4 Geoffrey Wolff, quoted in Ben Siegel, ‘The myths of summer: Philip Roth’s “The Great American Novel”’, Contemporary Literature, 17, 2, 1976, p. 173. 5 Elaine Safer, ‘The double, comic irony, and postmodernism in Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock”’, Multi Ethnic Literature in the United States (MELUS), 21, 4, 1996, pp. 157–172. 6 On other demythologising writers such as Bernard Malamud and Robert Coover, see Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980, Chicago, Nelson Hall, 1982, pp. 211–262. 7 Philip Roth, The Facts, New York: Penguin, 1988, p. 8. 8 Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others, London: Jonathan Cape, 1975, p. 111. 9 Ibid., p. 121. 10 Henry Claridge, ‘Writing on the margin: E. L. Doctorow and American history’, in Graham Clarke (ed.), The New American Writing, London: Vision Press, 1990, p. 10. 11 Frank Kermode, Pleasing Myself: From Beowulf to Philip Roth, London: Penguin, 2001. 12 On Weequahic High School in the mid twentieth century see Sherry Ortner, ‘“Burned like a tattoo”: High school categories and “American culture”’, Ethnography, 3, 2, 2002, pp. 115–148. 13 See, however, Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, Escape Attempts, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 123–130. 14 Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, London: Pluto, 2000, p. 100. 15 Roth has attracted a massive number of reviews. These include: John N. McDaniel, The Fiction of Philip Roth, Haddonfield, NJ: Haddonfield House, 1974, p.166; Judith Jones and Guinevera Nance, Philip Roth, New York: Ungar, 1981; Hermione Lee, Philip Roth, London: Methuen, 1982; Steven Milowitz, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrating Universe of an American Writer, New York: Garland, 2000; Sanford Pinsker, The Comedy that ‘Hoits’: An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975; Bernard Rodgers, Philip Roth, Boston: Twayne, 1978; George J. Searles, The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985; Murray Baumgarten and Barbara Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990; Stephen Wade, Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996; Mark Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; Debra Shostak, Philip Roth – Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004; Elaine Safer, Mocking the Image: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004; Derek Parker Royal (ed.) Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, Westport, CN: Praeger, 2005; Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth; Timothy Parrish (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A comprehensive bibliography can

Notes 181

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

be found on the website of the Philip Roth Society: http//:orgs.tamu-commerce.edu/ rothsoc/ (accessed 24 February 2007). Roth, The Facts, p. 32. Roth, Reading Myself and Others, p. 180. Ibid., pp. 182–183. Ibid., pp. 180–181. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, London: Corgi, 1971, p. 61. The origins of the cheer are, apparently, unknown and ‘could have been coined by non-Jews ridiculing Weequahic athletics or [...] by the famous self-ironizing Jews themselves’: Ortner, ‘“Burned like a tattoo”’, p. 144. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, p. 62. Ibid., p. 60. On this subject see Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the AmericanJewish Experience, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 144–169. Roth, The Facts, p. 28. Levene, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, pp. 170–189. In Roth’s writing there is no shortage of Jewish athletes, upsetting the ‘cultural/racial politics that equates blackness with body, sexuality, and suffering, Jewishness with mind and virtue’: Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, p. 205. See, for example, George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 93–94. Roth, The Facts, p. 28. Ibid. Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, p. 170. Philip Roth, The Counterlife, London: Penguin, 1996, p. 137. Roth, The Facts, p. 28. Paul Hoch, Rip off the Big Game, Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 83. Roth, The Facts, p. 64. Christian Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 230. Sander L. Gilman, ‘The fanatic: Philip Roth and Hanif Kureishi confront success’, Comparative Literature, 58, 2, 2006, p. 153n. For example, Roth is quoted in social history texts such as Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, in ethnographic work by Ortner, ‘“Burned like a tattoo”’, in urban studies writing such as Larry Schwartz, ‘Roth, race and Newark’, Cultural Logic, 2005, http://clogic.eserver.org/ 2005/2005.html (accessed 28 November 2006), by Michael Klimmage, ‘In History’s grip: Philip Roth’s “Newark Trilogy”’, Philologie im Netz, 32, 2005, http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin32/32i.htm (accessed 8 June 2006), and in psychoanalysis by Michael Craig Miller, ‘Winnicott unbound: The fiction of Philip Roth and the sharing of potential space’ International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 19, 1992, pp. 445–456. Jonathan Schwartz, ‘High school classmates revisited: Sherry Ortner and Philip Roth’, Anthropology Today, 14, 6, 1998, pp. 14–16. Ibid., p. 15. Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, p. 155. Searles, Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, p. 122. Philip Roth, When She was Good, New York: Random House, 1967. See Derek Gregory, ‘Areal differentiation and post-modern human geography’, in Derek Gregory and Rex Walford (eds) Horizons in Human Geography, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 88. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, pp. 77–78. Gregory, ‘Areal differentiation’, p. 88. Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire, New York: Penguin, [1977] 1985, pp. 24–25.

182

Notes

47 The erotic in sport literature, while not totally neglected, is a relatively new area of sports research. See Allen Guttmann, The Erotic in Sport, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Oddly, Roth’s sporting eroticism is ignored in this work. 48 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana, 1977, pp. 45–46. 49 Philip Rahv, quoted in Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, ‘Mourning the “greatest generation”: Myth and history in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 51, 1, 2005, p. 5. 50 Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 101. A good overview of myth and baseball is in Nicholas J. Mount, ‘“Are the green fields gone?” Pastoralism in the baseball novel’, Aethlon, 1, 1995, pp. 61–77. However, Roth’s work is not mentioned. 51 David Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 74. 52 Allen Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia, Amherst: University Massachusetts Press, 2005, pp. 127–128. 53 Michael Oriard, Sporting with The Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 453. 54 Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise, New York: Summit Books, 1989, p. 70. 55 Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, p. 78. 56 Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 87. 57 Quoted in Bill Brown, ‘The meaning of Baseball in 1992 (with notes on the postAmerican)’, Public Culture, 4, 1, 1991, p. 55. 58 Quoted in Richard Lipsky, How We Play the Game: Why Sports Dominate American Life, Boston: Beacon Press, 1981, p. 109. 59 Brown, ‘The meaning of baseball’, p. 55. 60 Robert J. Higgs, ‘The agonic and the edenic: Sport literature and the theory of play’, in Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.) The Achievement of American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991, p. 148. 61 Stephen Gelber, ‘Working at playing: The culture of the workplace and the rise of baseball’, Journal of Social History, 16, 4, 1983, p. 7. 62 Siegel, ‘The myths of summer’, p. 177. On baseball and time see Nicholas J. Mount, ‘Baseball time’, Time and Society, 3, 3, 1994, pp. 377–383. 63 David C. Dougherty, ‘Batters and archetypes: Baseball as trope in mid-century American literature’, in Michael Cocchiarale and Scott C. Emmert (eds) Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger, 2004, p. 5. 64 Ibid. 65 Roth, Reading Myself and Others, pp. 89–90. 66 Marshall Berman, ‘Dancing with America: Philip Roth, writer on the left’, New Labor Forum, Fall/Winter 2001, http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/newlaborforum/old/ html/9_article47.html (accessed 18 November 2006); Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction, p. 77. 67 Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, pp. 25–68, Robert J. Higgs, Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky Press. 68 Ibid., p. 30. 69 Leverett T. Smith, ‘John R. Tunis’s American epic; or Bridging the gap between juvenile and adult sports fiction’, in Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.), The Achievement of American Sports Literature, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991, pp. 46–61. 70 Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 35. 71 Shostak, Philip Roth, p. 182. It is generally recognised that the inspiration for Swede Levov was Seymour (‘Swede’) Masin who starred in basketball, track, and football at Weequahic High School in the 1930s and was considered to be one of Newark’s greatest athletes.

Notes 183 72 Philip Roth, American Pastoral, London: Vintage, 1998, p. 7. On Zuckerman and Tunis see Michele Schiavoni, ‘The place of John R. Tunis’ [sic] The Kid from Tomkinsville in Malamud’s The Natural and Roth’s American Pastoral, Aethlon, 21, 1, 2004, pp. 79–85. 73 Roth, American Pastoral, p. 14. 74 Ibid. 75 Philip Roth, The Human Stain, London: Vintage, 2001, pp. 93–94. 76 Ibid., p. 98. 77 Ibid., p. 102. 78 Ibid., p. 117. 79 Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, p.193. 80 Yi-Fu Tuan, The Good Life, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, p. 112. 81 Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, p. 194. It is widely suggested that the Silk figure is based on the writer and critic, Anatole Broyard. 82 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, pp. 203–204. 83 Ibid., p. 199. See also Mark Shechner, ‘Roth’s American trilogy’, in Parrish (ed.) The Cambridge Companion, pp. 142–157. 84 Gary Johnson, ‘Allegory as narrative and Roth’s American Pastoral’, Narrative, 12, 3, 2004, p. 243. 85 Ibid., pp. 244–245. 86 Stanley, ‘Mourning the “greatest generation”’, p. 9. 87 Roth, American Pastoral, p. 86. 88 Ibid., pp. 172, 100. 89 Jeffrey Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, p. 109. 90 Roth, American Pastoral, p. 100. 91 Ibid. 92 Schiavone, ‘The place of John R. Tunis’, p. 83. 93 Roth, American Pastoral, p. 275. 94 Ibid., p. 274. 95 Ibid. p. 105. 96 Ibid., pp. 111–112. 97 Eileen Z. Cohen, ‘Alex in Wonderland, or “Portnoy’s Complaint”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 17, 2, 1971, pp. 161–168. 98 Ibid., p. 162. 99 Roth, American Pastoral, pp. 3–4. 100 Stanley, ‘Mourning the “greatest generation”, p. 8. 101 Shechner, Up Society’s Ass, p. 167. 102 Ibid., p. 168. 103 Safer, Mocking the Age, p. 100. 104 Higgs, Laurel and Thorn, p. 9. On sport heroism as ‘personal regression’ see Jeffrey Segrave, ‘Sport as a cultural hero-system: What price glory?’ Quest, 45, 1993, pp. 182–196. Note also Alan Ingham, Jeremy Howell and Richard Swetman, ‘Evaluating sport “Hero/ines”’. 105 Lee, Philip Roth, p. 29. 106 It has been suggested by Jermey Larner that representing Jews such as the Patimkins as ‘passionately athletic’ is an inaccurate representation in that athletic sports were ‘not a favorite vehicle of the upper-middle class’. Larner suggests that ‘Jewish athletes were more prominent in the 30s and earlier, while lately [1960] more and more champions have come from the Negro population’: Jeremy Larner, ‘The Conversion of the Jews’, Partisan Review, 27, 1960, p. 762. However, of the sports referred to by Klugman/Roth, tennis, golf and swimming are still, to a large degree, middle-class, ‘white’ sports, in which ‘black’ athletes are greatly under-represented. In basketball and football they were only beginning to make their presence felt in the early 1960s with integration replacing the previously all-white teams.

184

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107 On Neil Klugman see Gerald Nelson, Ten Versions of America, New York: Knopf, 1972, pp.147–162. 108 Sol Gittleman, From Shtetl to Suburbia: The Family in Jewish Literary Imagination, Boston: Beacon Press, 1978, p. 168. 109 Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 250. 110 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 18. 111 Ibid., p. 12. 112 Baumgarten and Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth, p. 22. 113 On ‘passing’ in Goodbye, Columbus see Jessica Rabin, ‘Still (resonant, relevant and) crazy after all these years: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories’, in Royal (ed.) Philip Roth, pp. 13–15. 114 Gilman, ‘The fanatic’, p. 155. 115 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 9. 116 Ibid., p 7. 117 Ibid., p. 11, italics added. 118 Ibid., p. 13. 119 See Robert Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. On territoriality in sport, see John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, London: Leicester University Press, 1994, pp. 67–99. 120 Kerry Ahearn, ‘“Et in arcadia excrementum”: Pastoral, kitsch, and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel’, Aethlon, 11, 1, 1993, p. 6. 121 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 11. 122 Ibid., p. 12. 123 Ibid., p. 14. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., p. 15. 126 Baumgarten and Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth, p. 25. 127 Ibid., p. 19. 128 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 30. 129 Baumgarten and Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth, p. 32. 130 Allen Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 68. 131 Affinity with the Yankees in the 1950s had some social significance. ‘The Yankees were a team of success; they had money to buy the best players; and they dominated the World Series play in that era.’ Such imagery associated with sports served to ‘distance the Patimkins from their lower class roots’: Alan W. France, ‘Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and the limits of commodity culture’, MELUS, 15, 4, 1988, p. 83. 132 Dan Isaac, ‘In defense of Philip Roth’, Chicago Review, 17, 2/3, 1964, p. 85. 133 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 44. 134 Ibid., p. 52. 135 Ibid., p. 73. 136 Ibid., pp. 74–75. 137 Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play, 1990, p. 236. 138 Isaac, ‘In defense of Philip Roth’, p. 88. 139 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, pp. 74–75. 140 Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play, p. 236. 141 Baumgartner and Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth, p. 33. 142 William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life, New York: The Free Press, 1986, p. 35. 143 Quoted in Robert Lipsyte, Sportsworld: An American Dreamland, New York: Quadrangle, 1975, p. 272. 144 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 15. 145 Ibid., p. 31. 146 Ibid., p. 32.

Notes 185 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183

Ibid., p. 50. Ibid. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 50. Samuel J. Tindall, ‘“Flinging the shot put” in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus’, ANQ, 2, 1, 1989, p. 59. Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 36. Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (trans. Ian Fraser), London: Ink Links, 1978. Guttmann, The Jewish Writer, p. 69. Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, p. 55. Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play, p. 238, italics added. Milowitz, Philip Roth Considered, p. 69. Higgs, Laurel and Thorn, p. 80. Mark Goldman, ‘Comic vision and the theme of identity’, in Leslie Field and Joyce Field (eds) Bernard Malamud and the Critics, New York: New York University Press, 1970, p. 168 (originally published in Critique, Winter, 1964/65, pp. 92–109). Higgs, Laurel and Thorn, p. 80, italics added. Searles, The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, p. 145. Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 200, p. 24. Siegel, ‘The myths of summer’, pp. 171–172. Wolff, quoted in Siegel, ‘The myths of Summer’, p. 172. Elaine Safer, ‘Tragedy and farce in Roth’s The Human Stain, Critique, 43, 3, 2002, p. 213. Frank R. Ardolino, ‘The Americanization of the Gods: Onomastics, myth, and history in Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel’, Arete, 3, 1985, p. 35. Roth, Reading Myself and Others, p. 76. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Derek Parker Royal, ‘Pastoral dreams and national identity in American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, in Royal (ed.), Philip Roth, p. 201. Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 254. Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonsbury, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 480. Thomas R. Edwards, New York Times, 6 May, 1973 www.nytimes.com/98/10/11/ specials/roth-great.html (accessed 10 November 2006). Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 22. Derek Parker Royal, ‘Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism’, in Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion, p. 25. Robert Detweiler, ‘Games and play in modern American literature’, Contemporary Fiction, 17, 1, 1976, pp. 51–52. Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes, p. 250. For example, Anne Margaret Daniel, ‘Philip Roth, MVP: Our Great American Novel, The Breast, and The Great American Novel’, in Royal (ed.), Philip Roth, p. 60. Jerry Klinkovitz, ‘Philip Roth’s anti-baseball novel’, Western Humanities Review, XLVII, 1, 1981, pp. 30–40. Lee, Philip Roth, p. 53. Klinkowitz, ‘Philip Roth’s anti-baseball novel’; Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940, London: Longman, 1997, pp. 155–162. Thomas Blues, ‘Is there life after baseball? Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel’, American Studies, 32, 1, 1981, p. 74. Eric Solomon, ‘Jews, baseball and the American novel’, Arete, 1, 2, 1984, p. 62 (italics in original). Schwartz, ‘Postmodernist baseball’, p. 140.

186 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193

194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209

210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224

Notes Roth, Reading Myself and Others, p. 92. Blair and Hill, American Humor, p. 477. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 17. Ibid., p. 22. Schwartz, ‘Postmodernist baseball’, p. 140. Blair and Hill, America’s Humor, p. 483. Schwartz, ‘Postmodernist Baseball’, p. 141. Roth, Reading Myself and Others, p. 87 (italics as in original). Steven Reiss, Touching Base, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1999. For example, Blues, ‘Is there life after baseball?’; Klinkowitz, ‘Philip Roth’s anti-baseball novel’; Schwartz, ‘Postmodern baseball’; Bernard Rodgers, ‘The Great American Novel and “The Great American Joke”’, Critique, 16, 2, 1974; Derek Parker Royal, ‘Fouling out the American pastoral: Rereading Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel’, in Cocchiarale and Emmert (eds) Upon Further Review, pp. 157–168. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 111. Ardolino, ‘The Americanization of the Gods’, p. 38. Ibid., p. 292. Blues, ‘Is there life after baseball?’, p. 74. Robert W. Lewis, Sport and Fiction in the Fiction of John Updike and Philip Roth, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbus: Ohio State University, 1973, pp. 180–181. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 160. Royal, ‘Fouling out the American pastoral’, p. 159. Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals, Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1992, p. 186. The stadium was demolished in 1967. Schwartz, ‘Postmodern baseball’, p. 141. Ibid. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 286 (italics added). Ibid., p. 272 (italics added). Wade, The Imagination in Transit, pp. 76–77. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 13. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, p. 16. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 13. The recognition of skill and performance in the body-cultural practice of controlling the abdominal muscles is not as bizarre (or fictional) as Smitty suggests. It is suggestive of the physical skill of Joseph Pujol (1857–1945) whose stage name was Le Pétomane and who performed widely as a professional ‘flatulist’ at, among many other venues, the Moulin Rouge in Paris. See Jean Nohain and F. Cardec, Le Pétomane 1857–1945, Sherborne: Souvenir Press, 1968. The sportisation of spitting is neatly portrayed in Robbie Fox’s 1993 twentyminute film, The Great O’Grady. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 15. Blair and Hill, America’s Humor, p. 486. Klinkowitz, ‘Philip Roth’s anti-baseball novel’, p. 34. Roth, The Great American Novel p. 52. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 88, italics added. Pinsker, The Comedy, p. 88. Searles, The Fiction of Philip Roth, p. 100. Pinsker, The Comedy, p. 88. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 270. Ibid. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. ix. Roth, The Facts, p. 107.

Notes 187 225 226 227 228 229 230 231

232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244

245 246

247 248 249 250 251 252 253

Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., pp. 88–89. On this subject see John Bale, ‘A geographical theory of sport’, in Verner Møller and John Nauright (eds) The Essence of Sport, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003, pp. 81–92. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 286. Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings (ed. Norbert Müller), Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000, p. 200. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 287. Leo Durocher was an infielder who had a twenty-year career with the New York Yankees, Cincinnati Reds, St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers. He also became a well known manager. Again, a real person intrudes into Roth’s ‘fiction’. De Coubertin, Olympism, p. 292. Ibid., p. 704 (italics added). Franz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, New York: Gove, 1967. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 293. See, for example, John Bale, Imagined Olympians: Body Culture and Colonial Representation in Rwanda, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. See, for example, Brett St Louis, ‘Sport, genetics and the “natural athlete”: The resurgence of racial science’, Body and Society, 9, 2, 2003, pp. 75–96. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 193. Ibid., p. 298. Ibid. Tamar Rothenburg, ‘Voyeurs of imperialism: The National Geographic Magazine before World War II’, in Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (eds), Geography and Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 155–172. H. E. Lambert, Kikuyu Social and Political Institutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 53–54. Quoted in Robert J. Foster, ‘From Trobriand cricket to rugby nation: The mission of sport in Papua New Guinea’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 23, 5, 2006, pp. 739–758. Trobriand cricket is discussed in, for example, H. A. Powell, ‘Cricket in Kiriwina’, The Listener, 4 September, 1952, pp. 384–385; Annette Weiner, Review of ‘Trobriand cricket: An indigenous response to colonialism’, American Anthropologist, NS 79, 2, 1977, pp. 506–507; J. W. Leach, ‘Structure and message in Trobriand Cricket’, in Jack R. Rollwagen (ed.) Anthropological Film Making, New York: Harwood, 1988; Sally Ann Ness, ‘Understanding cultural performance: “Trobriand Cricket”’, The Drama Review (TDR), 32, 4, 1988, pp. 135–147. Bronisaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and their Magic (vol. 1), London: Allen and Unwin, 1935, p. 211. See, for example, Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 171. Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 78. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 378. Rodgers, ‘The Great American Novel’, p. 22. Roth, Reading Myself and Others, p. 91. Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 137.

188

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254 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, London: The Nonesuch Press, 1939, p. 196. 255 Roth, The Great American Novel, p. 88. 256 Ibid., p. 97. 257 Ibid., p. 372. 258 McDaniel, The Fiction of Philip Roth, p. 166. 259 Derek Parker Royal, ‘Plotting the frames of subjectivity: Identity, death, and narrative in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain’, Contemporary Literature, 1, 47, 2006, p. 118. 260 Roth, The Human Stain, pp. 208–209. 261 Hayden White, ‘Introduction: Historical fiction, fictional history, and historical reality’, Rethinking History, 9, 2/3, 2005, p. 149. 262 Ibid. At the end of Roth’s The Plot Against America, he includes an appendix that supplies ‘A true chronology of major figures’ compared with their representation in the book. Given more space I could have included a similar chronology of baseball history, comparing Roth’s presentation with that found in any baseball history text. 263 Roth, ‘Writing American fiction’ in Reading Myself, pp. 117–136. Here Roth lists a number of prominent Americans whom it would be difficult for a fiction writer to invent. 264 See, for example, Andrew Jennings, The New Lords of the Rings, London: Simon and Schuster, 1996 and (with Clare Sambrook), The Great Olympic Swindle, Wisbech: Wizbech Books, 2000. 265 Royal, ‘Fouling out the American pastoral’, p. 162. 266 Berman, ‘Dancing with America’. 267 Royal, ‘Fouling out the American pastoral’, p. 163. 268 For example, Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History, London: Routledge, 2005 and Murray Phillips (ed.) Deconstructing Sports History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Among sports historians Jeffrey Hill is an exception. See his Sport and the Literary Imagination, pp. 93–111. 269 Geneviève Rail (ed.) ‘Introduction’ in Sport and Postmodern Times, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, p. xi. 270 Gunnar Olsson, Eggs in Bird/Birds in Egg, London: Pion, 1980, pp. 17–18e. 271 Ibid., p. 29e. 272 Jack Higgs, email communication (received 28 March 2006). 8 Fictions, facts, binaries and place 1 Hans Lenk, ‘Toward a social philosophy of achievement and athletics’, Man and World, 9, 1, 1976, p. 48. 2 Hans Lenk and Gunther Gebauer, ‘Sport and sports literature from the perspective of methodological interpretation’, Aethlon, 5, 2, 1988, pp. 73–86. On ‘reconstruction’ and other ways of writing sport see Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sports History, London: Routledge, 2006. 3 Lenk and Gebauer, ‘Sport and sports literature’, p. 81. 4 Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, London: Faber and Faber, 1992. 5 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, London: Methuen, 1976, p. 18. 6 Jeffrey Hill, ‘Sport stripped bare: Deconstructing working-class masculinity’, Men and Masculinities, 7, 4, 2005, p. 421. 7 Lenk and Gebauer, ‘Sport and sports literature’, p. 83. 8 Booth, The Field, pp. 8–13. 9 Lenk and Gebauer, ‘Sport and sports literature’, p. 84. 10 Ibid. 11 Robert C. Goldbort, ‘“How dare you sport thus with life?”: Frankensteinian fictions as case studies in scientific ethics’, The Journal of Medical Humanities, 16, 2, 1995, pp. 79–91.

Notes 189 12 Knud Lundberg, The Olympic Hope, London: Stanley Paul, 1958. On cyborgs in sport see, for example, Cheryl Cole, ‘Addiction, exercise and cyborgs: Technologies of deviant bodies’, in Geneviève Rail (ed.), Sport and Postmodern Times, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, pp. 261–276. 13 Matthew Hannah, ‘Representation/reality’ in Noel Castree, Alisdair Rogers and Douglas Sherman (eds), Questioning Geography, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, p. 151. 14 Quoted in Alan Tomlinson, ‘David Storey’s and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life: Reflections on the aestheticisation of the sporting body’, Diegesis, 4, 1999, p. 12. 15 Ibid. It may be disingenuous to describe Storey as a ‘lay person’ but he was not an academic worker whose job it was to study sport. 16 Steve Redhead, ‘This sporting life: The realism of John King’s The Football Factory’, Soccer and Society, 8, 1, 2007, p. 99 (italics added). 17 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 8. 18 David Rowe, ‘“The misery of stringer’s clichés”: Sports writing’, Cultural Studies, 5, 1, 1991, p. 81. 19 Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (Alexander Woolcott, Intro.), London: The Nonesuch Press, 1939, p. 263. 20 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, ‘The modalities of nostalgia’, Current Sociology, 54, 6, 2006, pp. 919–941. 21 Hill, ‘Sport stripped bare’, p. 415 (italics added). 22 David Storey, This Sporting Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962, p. 250. 23 Rob Beamish and Ian Ritchie, Fastest, Highest, Strongest, London: Routledge, 2006. 24 Hill, ‘Sport stripped bare’, p. 418. 25 Here again, however, we come up against the ‘problem’ of binary dualisms and a hierarchy of value: the danger of ‘disciplinarity’ is obfuscation while that of ‘interdisciplinarity’ is shallowness. 26 See, for example, Andrew Sparkes, Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative Journey, Champaign: Human Kinetics, 2002, and Jim Denison and Pirkko Markula (eds), Moving Writing, New York: Peter Lang: 2002. 27 These final words come from Michael Eliot Hurst, ‘Geography has neither existence nor future’, in R. J. Johnston (ed.), The Future of Geography, London: Methuen, 1985, pp. 59–91. Hurst used it in a different context but it has stuck in my mind for over twenty years.

Select bibliography

This bibliography includes the major texts and significant additional materials used and discussed in this book. Adorno, Theodor (1981)(1991) The Culture Industry, London: Routledge. Ahearn, Kerry (1993) ‘“Et in arcadia excrementum”: Pastoral, kitsch, and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel’, Aethlon, 11, 1, pp. 1–14. Atherton, Stanley (1979) Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment, London: W. H. Allen. Auden, W. H. (1947) ‘Introduction’ to John Betjeman, Slick but not Streamlined, New York: Doubleday. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston (1974) The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1974. Bale, John (1994) Landscapes of Modern Sport, London: Leicester University Press. Bale, John (2003) ‘A geographical theory of sport’, in Verner Møller and John Nauright (eds), The Essence of Sport, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, pp. 81–91. Bateman, Anthony (2005) The Politics of the Aesthetic: Cricket, Literature and Culture, 1850–1965, unpublished PhD thesis, Salford: University of Salford. Baumgarten, Murray and Gottfried, Barbara (1990) Understanding Philip Roth, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Betjeman, John (1953) An Oxford University Chest, London: John Miles. Betjeman, John (1958) Collected Poems (compiled and introduced by the Earl of Birkenhead), London: John Murray. Betjeman, John (1960) Summoned by Bells, London: John Murray. Betjeman, John (1952)(1969) First and Last Loves, London: John Murray. Betjeman, John (1974) A Nip in the Air, London: John Murray. Betjeman, John (1960)(1976) Summoned by Bells, London: John Murray. Betjeman, John (1978) The Best of Betjeman (collector John Guest), London: John Murray. Betjeman, John (1994) Letters, vol. 1 (ed. Candida Lycett Green) London: Methuen. Betjeman, John (1995) Letters, vol. 2 (ed. Candida Lycett Green) London: Methuen. Betjeman, John (1997) Coming Home: An Anthology of Prose (Candida Lycett Green, ed.), London: Methuen. Bivona, Daniel (1990) Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blair, Walter and Hill, Hamlin (1978) America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonsbury, New York: Oxford University Press.

Select bibliography 191 Blake, Andrew (1996) The Body Language: The Meaning of Modern Sport, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Blake, Kathleen (1974) Play, Games and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Blaydes, Sophia B. and Philip Bordinat (1983) ‘Blake’s “Jerusalem” and popular culture: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Chariots of Fire’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 11, pp. 211–214. Booth, Douglas (2006) The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History, London: Routledge. Bowden, Martyn (1994) ‘Jerusalem, Dover Beach, and King’s Cross: Imagined places as metaphors for the British class struggle in Chariots of Fire and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, in Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn (eds), Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, Lanham, Mass: Rowman and Littlefield. Brauner, David (2001) Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Brohm, Jean-Marie (1978) Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (trans. Ian Fraser), London: Ink Links. Brown, Bill (1991) ‘The meaning of baseball in 1992 (with notes on the post-American)’, Public Culture, 4, 1, pp. 43–70. Brown, Dennis (1999) John Betjeman, Plymouth: Northcote House. Byars, John A (1976) ‘The initiation of Alan Sillitoe’s long-distance runner’, Modern Fiction Studies, 22, 4, pp. 584–591. Carey, John (1992) The Intellectuals and the Masses, London: Faber and Faber. Carroll, Lewis (1939) The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (Alexander Woolcott, Intro.), London: The Nonesuch Press. Carroll, Lewis (1953) The Diaries of Lewis Carroll 2 vols (ed. Roger Lancelyn Green) London: Cassell. Carroll, Lewis (1979) The Letters of Lewis Carroll (ed. Morton Cohen), London: Macmillan. Carroll, Lewis (1993–2004) Lewis Carroll’s Diaries 8 vols (ed. Edward Wakeling), Clifford: The Lewis Carroll Society. Clark, Anne (1979) Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: Dent. Cohen, Eileen Z. (1971) ‘Alex in Wonderland, or “Portnoy’s Complaint”’, Twentieth Century Literature, 17, 2, pp. 61–68. Cohen, Morton (1995) Lewis Carroll, London: Macmillan. Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson (1898) The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C. L. Dodgson), London: Fisher Unwin. Connolly, Joseph (1992) Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography, London: Orbis. Coubertin, Pierre de (2000) Olympism: Selected Writings (ed. Norbert Müller), Lausanne: International Olympic Committee. Crawford, Scott (1988) ‘Wilkie Collins: Master of melodrama and critic of Victorian Athleticism’, Aethlon, 5, 2, pp. 87–96. Cresswell, Tim (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De la Mare, Walter (1942) Lewis Carroll, London: Faber and Faber. Denison, Jim (1996) ‘Sport narratives’, Qualitative Enquiry, 2, 3, pp. 351–362. Dougherty, David C. (2004) ‘Batters and archetypes: Baseball as trope in mid-century American literature’, in Michael Cocchiarale and Scott C. Emmert (eds) Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger. Eagleton, Terry (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Eagleton, Terry (1991) Ideology, London: Verso. Edensor, Tim (2000) ‘Walking in the British countryside: Reflexivity, embodied practices and ways of escape’, Body and Society, 6. pp. 81–106. Faurot, Ruth Marie (1974) Jerome K. Jerome, New York: Twayne Publishers. Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin. Gagnier, Regenia (1991) Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920, New York: Oxford University Press. Gattégno, Jean (1977) Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking-Glass From Alice to Zeno, London: Allen and Unwin. Gelber, Stephen (1983) ‘Working at playing: The culture of the workplace and the rise of baseball’, Journal of Social History, 16, 4, pp. 3–13. Gilman, Sander S. (2006) ‘The fanatic: Philip Roth and Hanif Kureishi confront success’, Comparative Literature, 58, 2, pp. 153–169. Gindin, James (1962) ‘Alan Sillitoe’s jungle’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4, 1, pp. 35–48. Goldbort, Robert C. (1995) ‘“How dare you sport thus with life?”: Frankensteinian fictions as case studies in scientific ethics’, The Journal of Medical Humanities, 16, 2, pp. 79–91. Gregory, Derek (1989) ‘Areal differentiation and post-modern human geography’, in Derek Gregory and Rex Walford (eds) Horizons in Human Geography, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Guiliano, Edward (ed.) (1976) Lewis Carroll Observed, New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Guttmann, Allen (1971) The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity, New York: Oxford University Press. Guttmann, Allen (1978) From Ritual to Record, New York: Columbia University Press. Guttmann, Allen (1987) ‘Faustian athletes? Sports as a theme in modern German literature’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33, 1, pp. 21–33. Guttmann, Allen (1996) The Erotic in Sport, New York: Columbia University Press. Hanson, Gillian (1999) Understanding Alan Sillitoe: Understanding Contemporary British Literature, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Heath, Peter (1974) ‘Introduction’ in The Philosopher’s Alice, London: Academy Editions. Heikkala, Juha (1993) ‘Discipline and excel: Techniques of the self and body and the logic of competition’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 10, 4, pp. 397–412. Helperin, John (1979) ‘Interview with Alan Sillitoe’, Modern Fiction Studies, 25, 2, pp. 175–189. Hetherington, Kevin (1997) The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London: Routledge. Higgs, Robert J. (1981) Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Higgs, Robert J. (1991) ‘The agonic and the edenic: Sport literature and the theory of play’, in Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.) The Achievement of American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Higson, Andrew (ed.) (1996) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell. Hill, Jeffrey (2005) ‘Sport stripped bare: Deconstructing working-class masculinity’, Men and Masculinities, 7, 4, pp. 405–433. Hill, Jeffrey (2006) Sport and the Literary Imagination, Bern: Peter Lang. Hillier, Bevis (1989) Young Betjeman, London: Cardinal. Hillier, Bevis (2002) John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love, London: John Murray.

Select bibliography 193 Hillier, Bevis (2004) Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter, London: John Murray. Hoch, Paul (1972) Rip Off the Big Game, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Hudson, Derek (1954) Lewis Carroll, London: Constable. Hughson, John (2004) ‘Audio visual review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 39, 2, pp. 235–250. Hughson, John (2005) ‘The “loneliness” of the angry young sportsman’, Film and History, 35, 2, pp. 41–48. Hurrell, John Dennis (1960/61) ‘Alan Sillitoe and the serious novel’, Critique, 4, 1, pp. 3–16. Hutchings, William (1987) ‘The work of play: Anger and the expropriated athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33, 1, pp. 35–47. Ingham, Alan, Howell, Jeremy and Swetman, Richard (1993) ‘Evaluating sport “hero/ines”’, Quest, 45, pp. 197–210. Inglis, Simon (1983) The Football Grounds of England and Wales, London: Willow Books. Isernhagen, Hartwig (1979) ‘The thematic unity of the Long-Distance Runner: The short story as a semi-qualified medium of social criticism’, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 12, 3. Jerome, Jerome K. (1898) The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, London: Hurst and Blackett. Jerome, Jerome K. (1900) Three Men on the Bummel, London, Arrowsmith. Jerome, Jerome K. (1902) Paul Kelver, London: Hutchinson. Jerome, Jerome K. (1905) Idle Ideas in 1905, London: Hurst and Blackett. Jerome, Jerome K. (1926) My Life and Times, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Jones, Jo Elwyn and J. Francis Gladstone (1996) The Red King’s Dream or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, London: Pimlico. Jones, Judith and Nance, Guinevera (1981) Philip Roth, New York: Ungar. Leach, Karoline (1997) In the Shadow of the Dream Child, London: Peter Owen. Lee, Hermione (1982) Philip Roth, London: Methuen. Lenk, Hans (1976) ‘Toward a social philosophy of achievement and athletics’, Man and World, 9, 1, pp. 43–59. Lenk, Hans and Gebauer, Gunter (1988) ‘Sport and sports literature from the perspective of methodological interpretation’, Aethlon, 5, 2, pp. 73–86. Lennon, Florence Baker (1947) Lewis Carroll, London: Cassell. Lundberg, Knud (1958) The Olympic Hope, London: Stanley Paul. Mangan, J. A. (2000) Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, London: Frank Cass. Marples, Morris (1959) Shanks’s Pony: A Study of Walking, London: Dent. McDaniel, John N. (1974) The Fiction of Philip Roth, Haddonfield, NJ: Haddonfield House. Messenger, Christian (1990) Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press. Milowitz, Steven (2000) Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrating Universe of an American Writer, New York: Garland. Moss, Alfred (1928) Jerome K. Jerome: His Life and Works, London: Selwyn and Blount. Mount, Nicholas J. (1995) ‘“Are the green fields gone?” Pastoralism in the baseball novel’, Aethlon, 1, pp. 61–77. Mowl, Timothy (2000) Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman Versus Pevsner, London: John Murray. Olsson, Gunnar (1980) Eggs in Bird/Bird in Eggs, London: Pion. Oriard, Michael (1982) Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980, Chicago: Nelson-Hall.

194

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Ortner, Sherry (2002) ‘“Burned like a tattoo”: High school categories and “American culture”’, Ethnography, 3, 2, pp. 115–48. Orwell, George (1945) ‘The sporting spirit’, Tribune, December. Palmer, Melvin D. (1973) ‘The sports novel: Mythic heroes and natural man’, Quest, 19, pp. 49–58. Parrish, Timothy (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penner, Allen (1969) ‘Human dignity and social anarchy: Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”’, Contemporary Literature, 10, 2, 253–265. Penner, Allen (1972) Alan Sillitoe, New York: Twayne Publishers. Phillips, Murray (ed.) (2005) Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis, Albany: State University of New York Press. Phillips, Norma (1975) ‘Sillitoe’s “The Match” and its Joycean counterparts’, Studies in Short Fiction, 12, 1, pp. 9–14. Phillips, Robert (ed.) (1972) Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as seen through the Critics’ Looking-Glass 1865–1971, London: Gollancz. Pinsker, Sanford (1975) The Comedy that “Hoits”: An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Pitcher, George (1965) ‘Wittgenstein, nonsense and Lewis Carroll’, Massachusetts Review, 6, 3, pp. 591–611. Posnock, Ross (2006) Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Press, John (1966) ‘Charles Sorley’, Review of English Literature, 7, 2, pp. 43–60. Pronger, Brian (2002) Body Facism: Salvation in the Technology of Physical Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rail, Geneviève (ed.) (1998) Sport and Postmodern Times, Albany: State University of New York Press. Reed, Langford (1932) The Life of Lewis Carroll, London: Foyle. Reeve, Simon (2000) One Day in September, London: Faber. Relph, Edward (1976) Place and Placelessness, London: Pion. Richards, Thomas (1993) The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso. Rigauer, Bero (1981) Sport and Work (trans. Allen Guttmann), New York: Columbia University Press. Robinson, Roger (2003) Running in Literature, Halcottsville, NY: Breakaway Books. Rodgers, Bernard (1978) Philip Roth, Boston: Twayne. Rollins, Janet Buck (1981) ‘Novel into film. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 9, pp. 172–188. Roth, Philip (1964) Goodbye Columbus, London: Corgi. Roth, Philip (1971) Portnoy’s Complaint, London: Corgi. Roth, Philip (1973) The Great American Novel, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (1975) Reading Myself and Others, London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (1977) The Professor of Desire, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1988) The Facts, New York: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1996) The Counterlife, London: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1998) American Pastoral, London: Vintage. Roth, Philip (2001) The Human Stain, London: Vintage. Royal, Derek Parker (ed.) (2005) Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, Westport, CN: Praeger.

Select bibliography 195 Sack, Robert (1986) Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Safer, Elaine (1996) ‘The double, comic irony, and postmodernism in Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock”’, Multi Ethnic Literature in the United States (MELUS), 21, 4, pp. 157–172. Safer, Elaine (2004) Mocking the Image: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, Albany: State University of New York Press. Schiavoni, Michele (2004) ‘The place of John R. Tunis’ [sic] The Kid from Tomkinsville in Malamud’s The Natural and Roth’s American Pastoral, Aethlon, 21, 1, pp. 79–85. Schröder, Leena Kore (1988) ‘Heterotopian constructions of Englishness in the work of John Betjeman’, Critical Survey, 10, 2, pp. 15–34. Schwartz, Jonathan (1998) ‘High school classmates revisited: Sherry Ortner and Philip Roth’, Anthropology Today, 14, 6, pp. 14–16. Searles, George J. (1985) The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Segrave, Jeffrey (1993) ‘Sport as a cultural hero-system: What price glory? Quest, 45, pp. 182–196. Shearman, Montague (1888) Athletics and Football, London: Longmans, Green. Shechner, Mark (2003) Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Shostak, Debra (2004) Philip Roth – Countertexts, Counterlives, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Siegel, Ben (1976) ‘The myths of summer: Philip Roth’s “The Great American Novel”’, Contemporary Literature, 17, 2, pp. 171–190. Sillitoe, Alan (1959) The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, London: Flamingo. Sillitoe, Alan (1961) Key to the Door, London: W. H. Allen. Sillitoe, Alan (1975) Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays by Alan Sillitoe, London: W. H. Allen. Sillitoe, Alan (1996) Life Without Armour: An Autobiography, London: Flamingo. Slack, John A. (2000) ‘A sporting chance: Sports delinquency and rehabilitation in “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, Aethlon, 17, 2, pp. 1–15. Smith, Leverett T. (1991) ‘John R. Tunis’s American epic; or Bridging the gap between juvenile and adult sports fiction’, in Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.), The Achievement of American Sports Literature, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 46–61. Solnit, Rebecca (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London: Verso. Sorley, Charles Hamilton (1916) Marlborough and Other Poems (ed. William Ritchie Sorley), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spear, Hilda D. (1978) The Poems and Selected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley, Dundee: Blackness Press. Stapleton, Margaret (1974) Sir John Betjeman: A Bibliography of Writings By and About Him, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Stedman, A. M. M. (1899) Oxford: Its Life and Schools, London: Methuen. Stoffel, Stephanie Lovett (1997) Lewis Carroll and Alice, London: Thames & Hudson. Storey, David (1962) This Sporting Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sundmark, Björn (1999) Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum, Lund: Lund University Press. Swann, Thomas Burnett (1965) The Ungirt Runner: Charles Hamilton Sorley, Poet of World War One, Hamden, Conn: Archon Books. Taylor, Alexander (1952) The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

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Taylor-Martin, Patrick (1984) John Betjeman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1974) Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1999) Who am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Vaverka, Ronald Dee (1978) Commitment as Art: A Marxist Critique of a Selection of Alan Sillitoe’s Political Fiction, Stockholm: Almquvist and Wiksell. Vinnai, Gerhard (1973) Football Mania (trans. David Fernbach and Martin Gillard), London: Ocean Books. Wade, Stephen (1996) Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Wallace, Anne D. (1993) Walking, Literature, and English Culture, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Waugh, Alec (1919) The Loom of Youth, London: Richards. Weiss, Paul (1969) Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry, Carbondale: South Illinois University Press. White, Hayden (2005) ‘Introduction: Historical fiction, fictional history, and historical reality’, Rethinking History, 9, 2/3, pp. 147–157. Wilson, A. N. (2006) Betjeman, London: Hutchinson. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft (1985a) Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography, London: Cecil Woolf. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft (1985b) The Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley, London: Cecil Woolf. Zadworna-Fjellestad, Danuta (1986) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Gravity’s Rainbow: A Study in Duplex Fiction, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Zamyatin, Yevgeny (1993) We, New York: Penguin. Zeller, Robert (1995) ‘Running away: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” revisited’, Aethlon, 13, 1.

Index

Abrahams, A. 22 Abrahams, H. 22 Adorno, T. 7, 10, 97 Allardice, B. 22 Amateur Athletics Association 19, 26 anti-intellectualism 2, 152 Arlott, J. 84, 95 Arnold, T. 2, 3, 90 Atherton, S. 96, 111 Auden, W. H. 39, 89 Augé, M. 89, 94 Bachalard, G. 89 Baddeley, W. 58 Baker, W. 131 Bannister, R. 54, 55, 89, 99 Barr, R. 57 Barrie, J. M. 59 Barthes, R. 118 baseball 119–20, 141–5; sliding in 143–4; in Japan 145 Bateman, A. 6, 10 Battista, G. 41 Baudrillard, J. 142 Beamish, R. 8 Bear, M. 115 Beckett, S. 12, 14, 110 Benjamin, W. 52, 107 Bentham, J. 20, 101 Berman, M. 121 Berra, Y. 136 Bethune-Baker, A. 45 Betjeman, E. 79 Betjeman, J. 15, 49, 52, 64, 77–95, 118, 152; and The Heretick 78–9; at Oxford University 79–80; sent down from Oxford 80; swimming and surfing 81–2; attitudes to sportsmen 82–4; attitudes to

sportswomen 85–9; and tennis 82, 85, 86, acquaintance with cricket 84; and golf 79, 92; view of architecture 91–2 Betjeman, P. 85 billiards 37 Bivona, D. 26 Black September Movement 106 Blair, T. 5 Blake, A. 4 Blake, K. 7, 26, 27, 28, 33, 37 Blake, W. 101 Blunden, E. 4, 6 body-culture 2, 58 Boehmer, E. 145 Bonde, H. 9 Booth, D. 149 Bourdieu, P. 75 Bournemouth 93 Bowden, M. 100, 109 Bowra, M. 79 boxing 2, 33, 56, 61 boys’ weeklies 3–4, 107 Brauner, D. 119 Bristol Rovers 104 British Board of Film Censors 109 Brohm J. M. 8, 9, 49, 101 Brooke, J. 94 Brooke, R. 44 Brown, B. 120 Bucknall University 113, 116 Bukh, N. 9 bullfighting 33 Byars, J. 99 Carey, J. 7, 149 Carroll, L. see Dodgson, C. Chadwick, H. 120 Cheltenham 90

198

Index

childhood sexuality 88, 118 climbing 106 Cohen, M. 32 Coleridge, S. 22 Collingwood, S. D. 18 Collins, W. 11, 14 Conan Doyle, A. 4, 59, 63 Connell, R. 13 Conner, S. 10, 12, 110 Connolly, J. 64 Cooperstown 112, 119, 136, 142 Corinthian Casuals 44, 76 Coulsdon 90 Courteney, T. 97 Cresswell, T. 107 cricket 2, 3, 5, 6, 26, 31–2, 34, 37, 78, 81, 94, 151; Trobriand 145 Culler, J. 108 cycling 23, 57, 59–60, 74, 77, 78, 89 dancing 83, 88 de Coubertin, P. 2, 7, 21, 28, 48, 63, 73, 74, 76, 142 de la Mare, W. 23 de Montherlant, H. 3, 10 Dickens, C. 3, 5, 10, 16, 20, 22, 68 disneyfication 62 Dodgson, C. 7, 14, 15, 17–38, 41, 42, 61, 68, 80, 93, 95, 100, 137, 146, 149, 151; and schizophrenia 17; early life of 17–18, 20; at Oxford 18–20; and physical fitness 20–5, 37; interest in cricket 19–20, 31–3; interest in walking 20–3; and the Caucus-race 25–7; and ‘cub-hunting’ 27; and Queen’s croquet 28–9; opposition to developing the University Parks 31–3, 37, 61, 93, 94; views on hunting 33–6; interest in tennis 34–6; and betting 36; and ‘croquet castles’ 36; and billiards 37; dislike of sports 37–8 Dodgson, W. 18 Doubleday, A. G. 119 Dougherty, D. 121 Douglas, A. 80 Dragon School 78 drugs 74 Duckworth, R. 24 duelling 60–1 Dunning, E. 61 Eagleton, T. 9, 12–13, 14, 42, 151 Eco, U. 12, 14

Ehrmann, J. 29 Elias, N. 61 exercise 25 fair play 34 Fenoulière, S. 100, 110 Ferrell, J. 110 Fitzgerald, F. S. 4 football 71, 84, 90, 91, 98, 103–5 Foucault, M. 47, 49, 94, 101 Gattégno, J. 25 Gebauer, G. 38, 149–50 Geddes, M. 82 Geertz, C. 116 Gelber, S. 120 Giamatti, B. 119 Gidney, A. R. 50 Gilman, S. 116 Gilmour, M. K. 145 Gindin, J. 102 Goldbort, R. C. 150, 153 Goldsmith, O. 31 golf 62, 79 Grace, W. G. 59 Gramsci, A. 8 Graves, R. 39, 46 Greenacre, P. 26 Gregory, G. 117 greyhound racing 81 Guttmann, A. 34, 95, 97, 119 133 Hägg, G. 54 Hamilton, I. 4 handicapping 35 Hannah, M. 150 Hanson, G. 102, 105, 111 hare coursing 33 hares and hounds 40 Hargreaves, J. 8 Harvey, D. 94 Hayes, W. 131 Heddon Court School 80, 81, 86 Heikkala, J. 102, 106 Henley Regatta 56, 76, 92 heroes see sports heroes heterotopia 93–4, 95 Hetherington, K. 94 Higgs, J. 120 Hill, J. 125, 149 Hillier, B. 78, 88 Hobbes, T. 41 Hoberman, J. 6

Index 199 Hoch, P. 116 hockey 53 home advantage 60 hooligans 73 Hope, J. 81 Hornby, N. 4, 5 horse racing 33 horse riding 85 Houseman, A. E. 54, 87 Hudson, D. 35, 37 Hughes, T. 2, 3, 10 Hughson 96 Huizinga, J. 75 Hunt, H. 20 Hunter Dunn, J. 85 Hutchings, W. 105 Hutchinson, A. 45, 46

Le Corbusier 89 Leavis, F. R. 10 Leiris, M. 12, 107 Lenk, H. 149–50 Lenk, H. 38, 149 Leonard, B. 115 Leslie, S. 26 Lesna, L. 60, 169 n31 Liddell, A. 19, 24 Liddell, H. 19 Lindqvist, S. 9, 14 Linton, A. 74 Loland, S. 50 Lolita 86, 88 London, J. 4 Loretto College 40 Lundberg, K. 150

Ibbotson, D. 99 ice-skating 19 ideology 5 Inglis, S. 90

MacNeice, L. 47, 49, 87 Magnarelli, S. 30 Mailer, N. 4 Major, J. 5 Malamud, B. 14 Mandelstam, O. 14 Mangan, J. A. 40, 50 Marcuse, H. 116 Marcuse, H. 7 Marlborough College 40, 44, 45, 53, 77, 78 marxism 8, 83, 94, 97, 109, 111 Masefield, J. 55 McNeish, J. 14 Melville, H. 4 Menzies, J. 87 Messenger, C. 116, 133 Metroland 91 Mill, J. S. 20 Miller, A. 36 Miller, E. 36 Mills, R. 89 Milowitz, M. 133 Missac, P. 52 Mitford, M. 4 Myerson, J. 13, 14 Møller, V. 8 Molony, E. 87 Moor Park Golf Club 92 Mowl, T. 83, 90 muscular Christianity 2, 3, 19, 40, 99 muscular Judiasm 115 Myerson, J. 13–14 myth 2, 3, 30,118–27, 111, 112–13

Jackson, T. 32 James, C. L. R. 6 Jenkins, G. 60–1 Jerome, J. K. 15, 24, 56–76, 92, 93; early life of 56–8, 93; and To-Day 57–8, 62, 73; and Three Men in a Boat 56, 57, 58; and Three Men on the Bummel 58; in Germany 60–1; landscape of sport 61 Jerusalem 101 Johnson, W. 145 Jones, H. 35 Jowett, B. 19 Joyce, J. 24, 148 Kahn, R. 135 Kant, E. 20 Keats, J. 46 Kermode, F. 113 Kincaid, J. 29 King, J. 5, 151 Kingsley, C. 2, 3, 5 Kipling, R. 40 Kirkegaard, S. 20 Kuhn, B. 136 Kundera, M. 48–9 labyrinth 30–1 Lancaster, O. 83 Lancing College 11 Lardner, R. 112

200

Index

Nabokov, V. 4, 86, 88 neo-marxism 8, 9, 26, 47, 63, 97, 101, 109, 116, 148 Nietzsche, F. 20 Nixon, R. 5 Nordau, M. 115 Nottingham Forest 97 Notts County 97, 104 Nurmi, P. 52 Oates, J. C. 10 Ohio State University 128, 130, 131 Olsson, G. 42, 148 Olympic Games 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 36, 42, 52, 59, 63, 76, 105, 106–7, 111, 150 Oriard, M. 10, 14, 15 Ortner, S. 116 Orwell, G. 3, 6, 14, 45, 76 Oxford University 2, 31–2, 44, 77, 85 pacemaking 74 paedophilia 17, 24, 160n3, 88 pain 33–4 paperchasing 40 Parry, H. 101 passing 124 pastoral 3, 90, 101, 102, 119–21, 135, 134, 124–7, 140; anti-pastoral 119 Pattern, G. 3 Phillips, N. 104 Piper, M. 85 Pirie, G. 99 placelessness 29, 89 Polzeath 82 Portnoy’s Complaint 113, 117, 119 Press, J. 50 professionalism 59, 60, 71, 75 Prolekult 9 Pronger, B. 8 Redhead, S. 151 Reinhart, R. 52 Relph, E. 89 Richardson, T. 96, 101 Rigauer, B. 7, 8, 9, 153 Ritchie, I. 8 Robinson, R. 14, 15, 50, 54, 96 Rodgers, B. 146 Roosevelt, T. 5 Rosenbloom, M. 115 Ross, B. 115 Roth, P. 14, 16, 95, 112–48, 149; boyhood 113–16; and Portnoy’s Complaint 113,

117, 119; and boxing 115; as ethnographer 116–18; and The Great American Novel 113, 118, 120, 121, 124, 134–47; and The Human Stain, 115, 122, 147; Goodbye, Columbus 113, 118, 127–34; The Professor of Desire 118; When She was Good 117–18; The Facts 115; Portnoy’s Complaint 116; writing styles 116 Roubal, P. 70 Rousseau, J-J. 20 Rowe, D. 13 Royal, D. P. 148 Rugby School 2, 18, 40 rule boundedness 29 running 3, 123, 132–3; forms of 39–41; sensory pleasure of 51; as freedom 51; cross-country 99; see also Sorley, C. and Sillitoe, A. 127 Ruppert, J. 137 Ruskin, J. 40 Said, E. 10 sailing 64 Sandow, E. 24 Sassoon, S. 4 Schröder, L. K. 94 Schwartz, J. 136 Scott, J. 8 Searles, G. 116 Segal, S. 41, 42 Shearman, M. 41, 49 Shechner, M. 115, 116 Shelley, P. 39, 46 Shibles, W. 28 Shorland, F. 59, 60, 71 Siegel, B. 120 Silkin, J. 51 Sillitoe, A. 15, 16, 96–112, 152; social background 97–8; and National Service 98; and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 14, 96–127; Key to the Door 106; ‘The Match’ 103–5; and mountain-climbing 106 skiing 63, 64 Slack, J. 111 Slough 83 slowness 48–9 soccer see football social bonding 83 sokal 70 Solnit, R. 20 Solomon, E. 136

Index 201 Solzhenitsyn, A. 14 Sorley, C. 15, 39–55, 63, 74, 78, 90, 100, 133; early life, 43–6; as World War I poet, 44; at Marlborough, 45–52; dislike of serious sport, 45; ‘Song of the Ungirt Runners’, 50–1, 54; time in Germany, 52–4; time in the army, 53–4; critique of Marlborough, 54 Sorley, J. 43–4 Sorley, W. R. 43 Spalding, A. G. 119 spartakiad 70 Spencer-Clarke (Moule), V. 81, 86, 87 sport: meaning of 1; types of 5; and work 8; interpretation of 14, 30; as chessboard 31; landscape of 34, 61, 89, 94; as bonding 73, 104, 138; erotic in 88; characteristics of 95; as freedom 100–3; as appropriation 103–7; as resistance 107–11; and scientism 140–1; and nationalism 105–6 sports heroes 66–7, 111, 121–7, 133 sports novel 14–15, 153 Stallard, H. F. 81 Stanford, D. 85 Stéphane, A. 59–60 Storey, D. 11, 14, 109, 151, 153; and This Sporting Life 109, 151, 153 Summers, W. 81 Sundmark, B. 26 Swann, T. B. 50 swimming 81, 85, 86 Tannenbaum, A. 66 Taylor, A. 34 Taylor, D. J. 76, 103 Taylor, F. W. 107 Taylor-Martin, P. 92 tennis 6, 58–9, 65–6, 67, 82; see also Dodgson, C. and Betjeman, J. Thoreau, T. 10, 23 Thorpe House School 80 topophilia 89–90, 91 Trollope, A. 10, 14

Tuan Y-F. vi, 27, 29, 39, 89, 123 Tunis, J. 121 Twain, M. 112 Uppingham School 40 Vaverka, R. D. 107, 110 Velocimen 23 Vincent’s Club 79 Vinnai, G. 8, 97 Virilio, P. 142 vivisection 33 walking 37, 41, 44, 56; see also Dodgson, C. Wantage Cricket Club 84 Warren, H. 80 Waterhead, T. C. 44 Watson, I. 30, 31 Waugh, A. 6 Waugh, E. 11 Webster, F. A. M. 40, 41 Weequahic High School 113–14, 115, 116, 121 Weiss, P. 93 Wells, H. G. 57 Wembley 89, 91 Whannel, G. 8 Whiteley, A. 24 Wilde, O. 80 Williams, H. 88 Wilson, A. N. 80, 87 Wilson, J. M. 46 Wolff, G. 134 Wordsworth, W. 20, 22, 46, 94 Wylie, J. 22 Wynter, A. 7 Young, J. 84 Zamyatin, Y. 68–9 Zeller, R. 99 Zweig, F. 151