‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Duchamp. ‘I don’t need to tell the time.’
‘You can’t anyway,’ said Einstein. ‘Time is curved. I’m sorry about the serve. I’ll pull it back a bit.’
‘Time is curved?’ protested Duchamp. ‘I think you’ll find that’s not right.’
‘It is right,’ said Einstein. ‘I can prove it.’
‘I look forward to it,’ said Duchamp and settled in for an explanation.
Einstein smiled. ‘You probably wouldn’t understand the proof. It’s very complicated.’
‘You can prove time is curved,’ checked Duchamp, ‘but I wouldn’t understand the proof?’
‘That’s about it.’
‘What a shame.’
‘You don’t think time is curved?’ asked Einstein.
‘Of course time isn’t curved,’ replied Duchamp. ‘It’s a rhombus.’
‘Can you prove that?’ asked Einstein.
‘I can,’ said Duchamp, ‘but you probably wouldn’t understand it.’
In the second set Einstein’s serve lost some of its penetration and Duchamp began to call out, ‘Oh, that is art!’ whenever he hit a winner. Einstein learnt not to bother chasing these shots, and then after a while noticed that they weren’t all winners.
‘He had me completely fooled,’ he said later. ‘He was calling things “art” that were actually just rubbish.’ This, of course, went to the core of the French game—whether the significance of a shot lay in the shot itself or in the way it is described. A unicorn exists because we can describe it. If Duchamp says something is art, is it art, or is Duchamp fooling us? If it is art, rubbish is art. If it is not art, who else is fooling us?
By the time Einstein addressed himself to these questions, he had let a lot of points go and the Frenchman was easing away. Einstein played with great power but was simply outfoxed.
Chandler and Hammett improvised well in a tough spot created by Benchley and Thurber. ‘It all happened very fast,’ Chandler said. ‘I’d heard of these guys. Word was they knew what they were doing. Word was right. Tall one could serve. The kid at the net hardly moved. Fired a few at the tall one. Got them back hard. Pinged a couple at the kid. Got them back clever.
‘“You take the tall one,” growled Dash. “Leave the other one to me. I’ll meet you back at the car.”
‘“Wait,” I said. “Toss it in behind the kid. Tall guy will move across to cover, then we punch it into the gap where tall guy was.”
‘“This had better work,” scowled Dash.
‘“Trust me,” I said.
‘“Why should I?” he barked.
‘He had a point. I didn’t even trust myself.’
The Leavis–Lawrence combination, so strong in the first round, came apart today against Chaplin and O’Neill.
‘We were great in practice,’ said Leavis.
‘We were great in theory,’ corrected Lawrence.
‘You played well,’ said Leavis.
‘I played like a woman,’ said Lawrence.
‘Just so,’ said Leavis. ‘You’re at your best when you’re playing like a woman.’
‘You played like a stick insect,’ said Lawrence.
‘Is this irony?’ asked Leavis.
‘No, cunt,’ Lawrence assured him, ‘it is not fucking irony. It is an industrial strength piston-driven fact.’
Day 29
Stravinsky v. Mann • van Gogh v. Orwell • Rhys v. Millay • Stead v. Smith • Waller v. Yeats • Eliot v. Wittgenstein • Lardner v. Faulkner • Auden and MacNeice v. Kafka and Muir • Sackville-West and Stephen-Woolf v. Prichard and Richardson
At the opening of the Stravinsky–Mann match, the wind swirled and eddied on court. As the gusts grew more fierce, canvas began flapping and lanyards slapped on poles. Bottles and cans rattled around in the stands.
Mann elected to serve and was waiting for a lull in the tempest when Stravinsky began running about the court with his arms spread out like wings, stamping his feet and changing direction, darting and weaving. All this movement was in perfect time with the jangling and scraping sounds, the banging of distant doors, the screeching of wire as fences strained against metal supports and dragged across uneven concrete surfaces. On and on went Stravinsky, driving himself into a fury, wheeling about in the sea of detritus.
Just as abruptly, the wind dropped, the storm abated and Stravinsky slowed in his movements until, arriving back where he had started, he folded his arms, dropped to the ground and picked up his racquet. At first a few people in the crowd applauded. Others joined them. Soon the entire stadium was clapping wildly.
‘I don’t even know what it was,’ enthused a Latvian woman, ‘but it was beautiful.’
‘Never seen anything like it,’ said a man from Wisconsin.
‘We were beside ourselves,’ said a Scandinavian couple.
What the Mann from Lubeck thought of this performance was not clear, but when play began he got about his business. As with all his matches, Mann was scrutinised by German tennis officials. Their eyes followed him around the court. They waggled their fingers at him and took notes. This seemed to spur Mann on. ‘They drive me,’ he revealed. ‘I am really playing against them. As long as they are there, I will be playing against them.’
‘Vincent has a big first serve,’ said Orwell before their match on the court next door, ‘and when his ground strokes are working he generates enormous power. He gets frustrated easily, which suggests some of his battles are internal. I don’t know whether Vincent plans his matches but, if he is hitting the ball well, that won’t matter much. I respond to what is happening around me. Vincent is elemental. Today’s question is “can a boat beat the ocean?”’
This turned out to be a fair assessment. Van Gogh served fourteen aces in the first set and lost two games. Orwell hoisted storm cones and waited. Van Gogh served eleven aces in the second and lost five games. Orwell prepared himself but still lay low. In the third, van Gogh served fifteen aces and lost the set 1–6. Orwell was up off the canvas and, as Vangers said later, ‘I was hitting it well but it would not go where I wanted. I hate it when that happens.’
‘It
