‘Who is younger,’ said the quietly confident Rushdie.
‘Who is silvier,’ said Pound, obliquely.
George Orwell, or ‘the artist formerly known as Eric Blair’ as he is sometimes called by the other players, beat American Harold Arlen in straight sets. Arlen played well but Orwell had too much.
‘Too good,’ said Arlen. ‘I tried to accentuate the positive but it was pretty stormy weather and I couldn’t get happy. Round I round I go, down and down I go, I don’t know. Somewhere, over the rainbow…what are you writing, George?’
Orwell looked up. ‘Pardon? Oh nothing. Just a children’s story I’m fiddling with. Sorry, what were you saying?’
‘Read it out,’ said Arlen. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s just a story,’ said Orwell.
‘Go on,’ said Arlen. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Once upon a time there was a puppy called Ma,’ Orwell read, ‘and he had an idea of how to make everything in the world work nicely.
‘“Nice world,” said Ma.
‘When Ma grew up into a big dog he understood that there were other dogs who didn’t agree with him. They wanted the world to be a bad place. So Ma bit them until they died. He thought his idea was better because it had a better name.
‘“Nice world,” said dog Ma.’
‘Read it again, George,’ said Arlen.
Round 2
Day 14
Chekhov v. Grainger • Proust v. Klee • Munch v. Betjeman • Stopes v. Besant • Baker v. Goncharova • Satie v. Carnap • Gershwin v. Segovia • Chaplin v. Carmichael • Hardy v. Koestler • Steinbeck v. Waugh
The second round got under way in conditions that made things difficult for everyone. At 9 am it was 39 degrees and between 2 pm and 3.30 pm the humidity leapt off the chart. Seventeen spectators were treated for heat exhaustion and several competitors struggled with cramps.
The players did what they could and some did it better than others. Top seed Chekhov was not inconvenienced by a spectacular display of ball-striking from gifted Australian qualifier Percy Grainger, who didn’t mind being beaten. Had he got his first serve in more consistently he might have stolen the opening set but Chekhov, who has been saying in press conferences all week that he wants to go to Moscow, is a model of concentration. In fact, it is beginning to look as if his public statements may not be entirely serious. After today’s match, for example, he practised for two hours and then said, ‘There’s nothing to do here. I want to go to Moscow.’
As the temperature rose there was every chance the first casualty of the heat might be Marcel Proust who looked to be struggling even during the hit-up.
‘I was,’ he said later, ‘conscious, in that way in which an awareness exists of some sense in which the recalled and the recalling are drawn together to co-exist in time, but which also remain distinct, each from the other, perfect and imperfect, fixed and drifting, oppressive and liberating, that the day before, when I had left the practice courts and walked across the park, I had been distracted by the water, not in its liquid movement or depth or colour so much as by the way its movement and depth and colour were forged into something else by the alchemy of being absorbed by my gaze, undirected as it was by any purpose, formal or otherwise, or any force of which I knew, beyond a sensitivity and perhaps not even a particular sensitivity but a mingling of perception and instinct which was acting not just upon me but on everyone who saw it, or who saw anything else.’
The lanky Parisian can never be written off. He has got to the quarters in an unbroken run of sixteen French Opens and you don’t do that by accident. On the other hand he has been doing a lot of his training ‘lying down’. His first thought this morning was that he might have to withdraw from his match against Paul Klee. ‘He is not strong enough,’ said the French team doctor. ‘His respiratory system cannot bear the strain.’
‘I will play,’ said Proust eventually. ‘I have come here to play and I will play.’
Results of tests should be known later tonight but it is believed the problem may be traceable to some pastries he consumed at breakfast.
Proust did just enough to go through, albeit under what must be one of the biggest injury clouds in living memory.
If Proust thought he had problems in the heat he might have spared a thought for Norwegian wraith Eddie Munch, who returned to Paris only this morning from an overnight trip to Oslo occasioned by a family bereavement. He travelled straight to the stadium for his match with John Betjeman and, as he said, ‘I caught sight of myself in a window as we came out on court and I looked shithouse. I looked at the barometer, which said 41. I looked at Betjeman who said, “Lovely day for it” and I thought, “Oh God! why do I keep doing this?”’
At the beginning of the second set he was officially informed by Charles Darwin that his father was dangerously ill. The remainder of the match was played in a sombre atmosphere and Munch left for Norway the moment it concluded, after first thanking Betjeman for his kind understanding.
‘Terribly difficult for poor Munch,’ said Betjeman. ‘I remember my own father’s death. One feels so much a disappointment to them, especially with one’s not wanting to take over the family firm, and one thing and another.’
By the time Marie Stopes and Annie Besant emerged from the players’ race the temperature on the ground at Centre Court was 46 degrees. Besant, the oldest competitor in the women’s draw, has plenty of experience in oppressive conditions but from the outset the Scottish Stopes handled them better.
‘Sometimes when the balls get very hot,’ she said, ‘they can swell slightly and come on to you a lot faster. What I tried to do today was get in and put them
