Vangers is regarded by many as the best player never to win a grand slam tournament. Plagued by ear problems which have affected his balance and by balance troubles which have affected his ear, he has career prizemoney to date of nil. He began wildly, returning service by rocking back onto his right foot and belting the ball with astonishing power as high in the air as he could. If it came down on his own side of the net, he shouted at it and hit it again.
Tennis offered other formal opportunities. It allowed Clarke to talk about his players in pairs, so that he could use one to put the other into comic relief. Spare a thought for poor Beatrix Potter, drawn to play Ayn Rand:
The players shook hands. ‘Good luck, Ayn,’ said Potter.
‘Get out of my way,’ replied Rand, ‘or I’ll fucking kill you.’
Part of the weird luminous glow of this book is its affection for its hapless participants. Parody is the purest form of admiration. Albert Schweitzer was scheduled to play Maurits Escher in a second-round match-up:
Schweitzer is no slouch and he didn’t do much wrong but at one stage he served to Escher’s backhand and Escher hit a beautiful forehand winner for 0–15. Schweitzer’s next serve was to Escher’s forehand. Escher hit a backhand winner of 0–30. Schweitzer served again, curving into the body. Escher somehow fended it back and Schweitzer hit a cross-court drive into the ad court and was passed by a shot coming back from the deuce court…‘I didn’t know where I was,’ said Schweitzer. ‘He was playing angles that weren’t there.’
Then there are the jokes on history. The Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, is drawn to play Leni Riefensthal. Clarke’s tournament does not take place in a political vacuum. The ‘Russian authorities,’ we learn, ‘want victories but are threatened by the players who achieve them.’ And ‘Nike president Friedrich Nietzsche has initiated legal proceedings against German organisers for attributing to him remarks expressing the idea that German players were supermen.’ A handful of players come to grief or disappear or are excluded from the tournament, and at least two are murdered. The survivors among John’s pantheon of writers and artists tend to be the non-conformists, the dissidents, those who diagnose oppression and resist tyranny.
When The Tournament was published, in 2002, John Clarke was in his early fifties. He was already the author of a dazzling book of poetic parodies, The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse. He had been writing his signature political interviews for fifteen years. He had just finished The Games, which Barry Humphries described as ‘the funniest television program ever made in Australia, as well as the most brutally honest depiction of local bureaucracy’. He was, in other words, at the top of his own game.
The Tournament is a lunatic book that is deeply sane about the power and the limits of art. Its crazy games pay homage to freedom and the life of the mind. Like so much of John’s writing it reminds us that when something is both funny and true it sinks in.
First set, Mr Clarke to serve. Play!
The Tournament
for
Charlie Boy
Preliminaries
Day 1
Ibsen and Monet v. James and Twain
If the players in this city aren’t careful they’re going to be among the most famous people on earth. Paris has gone crazy. More people in the streets would be hard to imagine, and that’s not counting the celebrities, the journalists, the experts. Every hotel is booked out. There are flags and banners everywhere, every colour under the sun.
Out at the stadium the crowds are already huge as competitors pound the practice courts in preparation for the greatest tournament of the era. Organisers predict it will be the most successful event of its type ever staged. All tickets are sold, there’s not a single ground pass left, and the worldwide television audience is tipped to be in the billions.
They’ve opened three more runways at the airport where players and officials have been arriving like migrating birds. Make no mistake about it, this tournament is anyone’s and they’ve come from all corners, the stars of the modern game.
Some have arrived in teams, the Germans last night: Hermann Hesse, Brecht and Weill, Gropius, Carnap and the great Mann, Heidegger, Schweitzer, Ernst. What a line-up!
Reporters tried to get a few words as the players came through but they were hurried out a side door.
‘No interviews will be permitted,’ said a German official.
This morning the Austrians were less formal. Gustav Mahler introduced some of the team: Wittgenstein, Melanie Klein, Werfel, Kokoschka, Gödel and Klimt.
‘We’re looking forward to playing here,’ he announced.
‘Where is Freud?’ asked Tennis magazine’s Norman Mailer.
‘Arriving by train,’ said Mahler. ‘Tonight, I think.’
From America we have Ernie Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Crosby, Frankie Wright, Ray Chandler, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan and Mary McCarthy. Amelia Earhart flew her single-seater from New York.
‘Great to be here,’ said Ernie. ‘The plane was high in the air. I slept and then I ate and drank and then I slept again. The sun came up. I drank again and then I slept. Then the plane banked and came in and landed and stopped and I could hear the great big engines being turned off. That’s the way it is.’
The South Americans have been training in Italy and turned up yesterday before anybody else: Borges, Rodo, Rivera and Kahlo, Neruda and Villa-Lobos.
The Swiss and the Dutch are here. Watch the Dutch. Their record is excellent and Escher and van Gogh are two of the strongest chances in the men’s competition.
The formidable Russian contingent came in over several days. They’re taking this seriously and have left nothing to chance: Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Pavlova, Akhmatova, Eisenstein, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Pasternak and
