‘We’re tennis reporters,’ said George Plimpton.
‘Exactly,’ said Mann. ‘What is happening to the game you’re covering? Where is Rosa Luxemburg? Where is Mayakovsky? Osip Mandelstam went missing yesterday. Where is he? His partner had been beaten up. Who did it? Robeson cannot even go back to his own country. Who are the people making these decisions? What is their purpose? What can ordinary folk do about it? What is democracy if we cannot answer these questions?’
‘If we write that, our editors won’t print it.’
‘They only want to know about the tennis,’ said Mailer.
‘We all have families to feed.’
‘Of course,’ said Mann.
Anna Akhmatova arrived on court this afternoon despite the best efforts of her own management. A promising junior, she was ruled out of the Russian selection process for many years and was banned altogether from playing in public. Re-admitted following a change in administration at the national level she quickly emerged as one of the game’s great talents. Her uneasy relationship with tennis officialdom was never more evident than it was today. She lost the first set to the intelligent play of Virginia Stephen-Woolf but when the going got tough it was Akhmatova who got going. The British press devoted more space to coverage of this match, and to Stephen-Woolf’s performance here at the tournament, than to any other single player. ‘If the match had been between two men it would have become a classic,’ bellowed The Times.
Details of Stephen-Woolf’s preparation are the subject of feature articles, often by members of her own circle. Her matches are replayed and analysed in universities all over the English-speaking world, lists of her equipment are published on the internet, and her laundry is for sale on ebay. Similarly, students of Russian tennis have poured out thousands of pages on the play of Akhmatova in the context of tennis, women’s tennis, Russian tennis, European tennis and singles tennis.
‘It didn’t seem to matter what I did,’ said Stephen-Woolf, ‘Anna was awake to it and her own game is so strong it’s difficult to throw her by trying to mix it up.’
Did Stephen-Woolf go into the match with a plan?
‘I think it’s important to play your own game. Only then can you vary it. Before one can do that, however, one must develop a game of one’s own. This is a great strength of Anna’s too, so I needed to be careful. First I imagined myself playing as a woman, but of course Anna was already doing this very successfully, and in a sense this was my problem. Then I imagined myself playing as a man but Anna dealt with that rather well, as Isaiah Berlin had led me to believe she would. In the end I think Anna’s determination to survive was perhaps greater than my own.’
Akhmatova thanked Stephen-Woolf and said the other person she wanted to thank was Osip Mandelstam. ‘Osip and I came through the junior ranks together and he taught me a great deal. Russian tennis authorities are very efficient. They will know where Osip is and they will be proud today that so much international attention is being paid to Russian tennis. I invite you all to be here in an hour. They will bring Osip Mandelstam here. We will thank him together.’
There is a powerful sense of foreboding now about where this tournament is going. The tennis and the event itself are struggling to stay in touch with one another. Some say only the tennis is real and nothing else matters. Others say the tennis is nothing; a distraction; an escape from reality. The play has been of the highest quality but there is no hiding the fact that the game faces serious problems. There is no word about the condition of Mayakovsky. Osip Mandelstam did not reappear this afternoon after a Russian official announced that he has ‘a hamstring problem’.
Paul Robeson has declared he will travel to Russia where he will play in a series of ‘exhibition matches’. This has been described at the American Tennis Activities Hearings as ‘absolute proof of exactly what we were saying, whatever it was’.
‘I am a black American,’ said Robeson. ‘I can do anything except go to my own country and be free.’
Dmitri Shostakovich, through to the second round of the men’s doubles with compatriot Prokofiev, is nowhere to be seen either. Russian officials say he is ‘nursing a strained shoulder’.
There is still no clue to the whereabouts of Rosa Luxemburg.
Spanish customs officials announced today that Walter Benjamin, the German who played so well here earlier, had been found dead near the border. Friends say Benjamin did not want to return to Germany.
And then there was the Duchamp–Hemingway match. Hemingway arrived, unshaven but splendid after a photo-shoot for Life magazine holding a bull scrotum between his firm white teeth. He seems to have substituted a wider public appeal for the group of private supporters who attended his earlier matches though his entourage today was somewhat depleted. Neither Agnes, Hadley, Pauline, Martha nor Mary was there. Sherwood Anderson was not there and neither were Fitzgerald, Pound and personal trainer Max Perkins. Gertrude Stein was present but seemed distracted and when she offered advice Hemingway turned to her and said, ‘Thank you. I’ll take suggestions from people who are still in the draw.’
‘What are you doing?’ she asked him.
‘I’m exhibiting grace under pressure,’ he replied, ‘and if necessary I shall continue to do so.’
‘You’ll have to,’ she replied, ‘if you keep playing like that.’
By contrast Duchamp almost sneaked onto the court, touched his toes a couple of times and waited for his opponent to make a move. At 4–4 in the first set he hit three winners from the Hemingway serve and the crowd sensed the initial rituals in a blood sacrifice to be played out in the sun.
