Luxemburg was wrong about that. Most of the press carried the story and it received wide coverage on television. There were two major versions of what had happened. One was headlined PARANOID POLISH WHORE ACCUSES GERMAN AUTHORITIES OF MURDERING WORTHLESS SHIT and the other was DANGEROUS CRIMINAL SHOT TRYING TO ESCAPE.
Of the massive German contingent which arrived in Paris, only Mann and Einstein remain in the draw and both are openly critical of current German tennis officialdom. Nike president Friedrich Nietzsche has initiated legal proceedings against German organisers for attributing to him remarks expressing the idea that German players were supermen. ‘What I said in fact,’ he claimed, ‘was exactly the opposite.’
At 10 am Thomas Mann called a press conference and attempted to say something but the sound system went dead, a hotdog stand blew up and the press tent caught fire. Matches were delayed for two hours while power was restored and officers checked the concourse for suspicious persons or other ‘devices’.
When the tennis started there was a concerted attempt to pretend that nothing had happened. It was obvious to everyone at the stadium, however, that the atmosphere was full of menace.
Thomas Mann’s previous matches were on outside courts but he was in the lion’s den this morning against the subtlety and placement of Eric Satie, who worked out what Mann was doing and began to steam his mail open. Every time Mann tried something different, Satie was on to it. Mann stopped booming his serve in and concentrated on accuracy; Satie boomed his returns in, crowded the net and forced the error. When Mann got the trainer out to look at a problem with one of his feet, Satie got his uncle out to look at some photographs. Satie and coach Jim Nopidies had worked on their rhythm and it was nearly the German’s undoing.
‘Satie is a tricky opponent,’ said Mann later, ‘because it’s hard to know what he’s going to do until he works out what you’re trying to do.’
Satie said Mann played ‘superbly’ and predicts big things for him ‘if he can get past Magritte’.
The French turned out in droves for the next match between the empress Simone de Beauvoir and little-known American Ruth Draper. A sensation was quickly on the cards here as de Beauvoir, playing as if the result were a formality, was put on notice that every point would be contested and that Draper had studied her game in detail. Draper was quick and efficient and the crowd watched in quiet dismay as she punched hole after hole in one of the great defences in modern tennis. The American was on the wrong end of some very dubious line calls to lose the second but she then raced out to 3–0 in the final set before the dame set off after her. Draper then became distracted by a small wooden aircraft flying low overhead. This was enough for de Beauvoir to clamber back in for a win. But she did not look like a champion today and she certainly didn’t feel like one.
‘Simone is a great player,’ said Draper. ‘And she’s not easy to play. One thing about German tennis, incidentally, is the influence it’s having on Italian tennis. If they go the same way I fear for many of my friends.’
In a statement released tonight it was revealed that Draper’s friend Lauro de Bosis, an Italian opposed to the current administration of German tennis and to its influence on Italian tennis, had this afternoon appeared over Rome in a wooden plane, throwing out leaflets encouraging Italian players ‘not to allow the game in Italy to be run by Germany’. His plane has not been found. Ms Draper is said to be ‘inconsolable’.
The crowd knew nothing of this, and was then presented with the more edifying sight of André Malraux carrying French hopes against Louis MacNeice. Auden, who was there to watch his friend MacNeice, said after the match that both players had performed brilliantly. He added that ‘the German tennis authorities have started rounding up Jews and dissident players in Germany. The head of the German Tennis Academy set the press tent on fire while Mann was talking. Mann and his family cannot return to Germany and are not permitted to leave France. I would like to announce that his daughter Erika and I were married half an hour ago and that as a result she will be able to remain in England, whither she has now departed.’
The next unit in the French line on Centre Court was the self-styled Parisian ‘wild beast’ André Derain. He was up against Big Bill Yeats, who sometimes plays as if he’s in a dream and sometimes as if he’s starring in a movie about his own life. Today he settled into his work well before spotting Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult high up in the northern stand, at which point he lost four games, broke his racquet and came out in a prickly rash. Covered in creams and soothing unguents he then lost the next three games and sat in the mist, moaning like a wounded stag. Gonne quietly made her way down from her eyrie and left.
Yeats regrouped and won two games before noticing Iseult trying to scramble down behind the stand onto the back of a truck. He lost the next five games and scratched the skin off part of his face. As the fifth set began his brother Jack, a great friend of Beckett and a handy player himself, encouraged him to get a grip.
Big Bill went to the back of the court, did a number of deep knee-bends and stood with his eyes closed for some time. He then served with greater power, moved like a panther and his fortunes changed. Changed utterly. Derain tried everything, but Yeats had his mind back on the job and was in full sail.
In an interesting afternoon, Plum Wodehouse,
