The primeval grace and rural poetry of the game is in great measure lost
Cricket has produced fine writers, as skilled with their pen and as bold with their strokes as the most graceful batsmen upon whom their gaze has fallen.
A writers’ XI would most likely include such luminaries as Neville Cardus, A.A. Thomson, John Woodcock, Matthew Engel, John Arlott, Alan Ross, David Foot and E.W. Swanton. Perhaps too Harold Pinter, whose musings on the game he so loved were few but memorable. ‘I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth,’ Pinter once said, ‘certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.’
No sport has generated such a library as cricket boasts. When John Arlott wrote about the genre of cricket writing for the 1964 edition of Wisden he noted that there were some 8,000 books about the sport. Half a century later and the number must be nearer 20,000. Players’ autobiographies have flourished, so too ‘tour diaries’ and photo-heavy books celebrating one tournament or another. Fewer are the more thoughtful books, considered reflections on the game we love so much.
But then again, fewer are the maudlin books when village greens were lush, evenings golden and the caress of leather on willow was a balm to all our hearts, etc. As Stephen Moss, literary editor of the Guardian in the 1990s, pointed out in an essay for the 2000 edition of Wisden, much of the early cricket writing was characterised by ‘the pastoralism; the belief in the rootedness and essential Englishness of the game’. He cited the example of Sydney Goodman’s 1898 work, The Light Side of Cricket:
Under the blue sky, field after field stretches far away to the wooded hills, while from hedge and copse alike comes the music of birds and streams, and the mingled fragrance of summer flowers. This primeval grace and rural poetry of the game is in great measure lost in routinelike dullness in vast and crowded amphitheatres surrounded by ugly pavilions, smoky houses and evil-smelling gasometers. Cricket on the village green… is more like the cricket in the days of those heroes of renown, Alfred Mynn and Caesar, Felix and Fuller Pilch, and round it still lingers that halo of glory which many minds love to associate with a far-off and forgotten time.
This obsession with cricket as representative of rural England, pure England, an England before steam engines, factories and ‘evil-smelling gasometers’ defined cricket writing up until the First World War. But idealism died in the trenches, and the 1920s brought a fresh approach to the genre: less elegiac and more erudite.
In the vanguard of this new style was Neville Cardus, who, in 1922, published A Cricketer’s Book. Cardus was an intellectual, a journalist on the Manchester Guardian with early aspirations to become the next Walter Pater, the celebrated essayist and art critic of the nineteenth century.
The primeval grace and rural poetry of the game is in great measure lost
Cardus searched for metaphors in every place, attending concerts, recitals and readings with the aim of unearthing the ‘theory of laughter’ or drawing some Rabelaisian parallel. He came to hate the world, and so sought solace elsewhere. ‘Cricket took me into a different element,’ he would later write. ‘I met unlettered people with no pretence, good craftsmen with bat and ball on the field of play, and for an audience they had crowds that expressed themselves honestly.’
Cardus moved to London and began writing regularly on the game, becoming the first – and arguably greatest – writer on cricket, deftly portraying the players not just as cricketers but as men, with strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. Often at the end of a day’s play at Lord’s Cardus spent the evening at the Covent Garden opera or listening to a concert at the Queen’s Hall. ‘As I have changed from one place to another, I have felt an acute lowering not only of standards of skill but of genuine English character; for taking them as a whole, concerts and opera audiences in London do not ring true, with their absurd “fashions”, their whoopings and screamings in the corridors at the intervals: “Marvellous, my dear!”, “Actually, you know, I prefer Toscanini’s Ninth!”.’
Cardus searched for metaphors in every place
This love for the game shone through his prose. ‘Before him, cricket was reported,’ John Arlott wrote, ‘with him it was for the first time appreciated, felt, and imaginatively described.’
When Cardus died in 1975 (by then a knight of the realm) aged eighty-six, more than 700 people filed into St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden for a memorial service. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra offered Elgar and Mozart in tribute to his standing as one of England’s finest music critics before the writer and broadcaster Alan Gibson addressed the congregation on the subject of cricket. ‘All cricket writers of the last half-century have been influenced by Cardus, whether they admit it or not, whether they have wished to be or not, whether they have tried to copy him or tried to avoid copying him,’ he said. ‘He was not a model, any more than Macaulay, say, was a model for the aspiring historian. But just as Macaulay changed the course of the writing of history, Cardus changed the course of the writing of cricket. He showed what could be done. He dignified and illuminated the craft.’