Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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streak, for example—are unrepresented in my CD collection. And I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined by children… But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Maybe that’s not worth the thirty-odd quid I blew on those collections of letters, admittedly, but it’s got to be worth something, right?
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
I have been meaning to read a book about cricket for awhile, with the sole intention of annoying you all. I even toyed with the idea of reading only cricket books this entire month, but then I realized that this would make it too easy for you to skip the whole column; this way, you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle. I’m presuming here that very few of you have ever seen a cricket match, and if you have, you are almost certain to have been both mystified and stupefied: this, after all, is a game which, in its purest form (there are all sorts of cheap-thrills bastardized versions now), lasts for five days and very frequently ends in a tie: five days is not quite long enough to get through everything that needs doing in a cricket match, especially as you can’t play in the rain.
The funny thing is that we actually do like cricket here in England—it’s not some hey-nonny-no phony heritage thing, like Morris dancing (horrific bearded men with sticks and bells), or cream teas. Thirty or forty years ago it was our equivalent of baseball, an all-consuming summer sport that drove football off the back pages of newspapers completely for three months; now Beckham and the rest of them get the headlines even when they’re lying on Caribbean beaches. But big international matches still sell out, and every now and again the England team starts winning, and we renew our interest.
Ed Smith reminds traditionalists of a time when cricketers were divided into two camps, “Gentlemen” and “Players”; the former were private-school boys and university graduates from upper-middle-class backgrounds, the latter horny-handed professionals who weren’t even allowed to share a dressing room with their social betters. Smith is a Cambridge graduate who reviews fiction for one of the broadsheet newspapers. He’s also good-looking, well-spoken, articulate, and he has played for England, so perhaps not surprisingly, On and Off the Field, his diary of a season, attracted a fair bit of attention, all of it, as far as I can tell, admiring. Where’s the fairness in that? You’d think that if critics had any use at all, it would be to give our golden boys and girls a fearsome bashing, but of course you can’t even rely on them for that.
To be fair to the critics, Smith didn’t give them much ammunition: On and Off the Field is terrific, exactly the sort of book you want from a professional sportsman but you never get: it’s self-analytical (even if, after the self-analysis, he attributes some of his early-season failure to sheer bad luck), wry, and honest. The sports memoir is such a debased form—George Best, the biggest football star of the sixties and seventies, has “written” five autobiographies to date, and he hasn’t kicked a ball for thirty-odd years—but On and Off the Field is different: the photo on the back depicts Smith slumped against a wall, the very epitome of defeated misery. Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this, but Smith is one of the very few capable not only of recognizing this bitter truth, but acknowledging it in print. I know you’re not going to read it. But let’s say I’ve read it on your behalf, and we’ve all enjoyed it.
To my surprise, I managed to read, in its entirety, one of the many books of collected letters I inexplicably bought last month. Why I read it, however, is almost as mysterious as why I bought it in the first place; or rather, I’m not sure why I felt I had to read every word of every letter. After a little while, you get the pattern: letters to his feckless brothers tend to be fiercely admonitory (and therefore fun); letters to his mother and sister tend to be purely domestic, functional, and a little on the dull side (“Tell Arseny to water the birch tree once a week, and the eucalyptus”); letters to his wife, Olga Knipper, are embarrassingly slushy, and the letters he wrote to Alexey Suvorin, his publisher, are the letters I was hoping for when I started the book: they’re the ones where you’re most likely to find something about writing. I should have stuck to the Suvorin letters, but you get addicted to the (mostly sleepy) rhythms of Chekhov’s quotidian life.
Chekhov, as you probably know (I don’t know why, but I always think of you lot knowing everything, pretty much, apart from the rules of cricket) started life as a hack, a journalist who wrote short comic articles for various Russian periodicals while training and then practicing as a doctor. And then, in 1886, when he was just beginning to take his writing more seriously, he received the sort of letter most young writers can only dream of getting. Dmitry Grigorovich, a respected older novelist, wrote out of the blue to tell him he was a genius, and he should stop pissing around.
I know from personal experience that these letters have a galvanizing effect at first. But once you’ve had twenty or thirty of them, you start to chuck them straight into the bin once you’ve checked out the signature. I had a rule that I’d only take any notice if the correspondent had a Pulitzer or a Nobel; if you get involved with every two-bit literary legend who wants to be your friend, you’d never get any work done. Some of them can be a real pain. (Salinger? Reclusive? Yeah, I wish.) Anyway, Chekhov’s reply to Grigorovich is every bit as humbled, as sweetly thunderstruck, as you’d want it to be.
“Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while very few have even heard of ‘The Wife’ or ‘In the Ravine,’” says Janet Malcolm in her short,