‘Do you agree that there are only four people in the world who can possibly play Chaplin and O’Neill in the quarters?’ asked Magritte. ‘JPS and Albert and Dali and me.’
‘That is exactly the position.’
‘Perfect,’ said Magritte. ‘Chaplin and O’Neill up one end. JPS and Albert and Dali and me up the other.’
‘No.’
‘Wasted opportunity,’ warned Dali.
‘Doesn’t make any sense at all,’ agreed Magritte.
In the event, Sartre and Camus took the first set but the rest of the match was a Magritte–Dali exhibition and the Belgian–Spanish combo will go on to meet Chaplin and O’Neill in the quarters.
Shostakovich and Prokofiev began well against Cocteau and Picasso but their play became erratic when they attempted to avoid the fluency of Picasso by concentrating their effort on his partner. But there’s not much Cocteau can’t do and it wasn’t long before they were hitting the ball to Picasso to give themselves time to think. The wiry Frenchman had a field day at the net, poaching anything he could put away, sure in the knowledge that the wonderful Spaniard was taking care of business behind him.
‘I had a great time,’ he said to the press. ‘I enjoy doubles, Picasso is my friend and I love this surface.’
The Arendt–de Beauvoir match, much hyped by local media, was a disappointment. Arendt had come so far, but surely she couldn’t topple the player for whom the women’s draw seemed to have been invented. De Beauvoir said she felt great; she was fit, she was ready and she was cheered onto the court as if she were Joan of Arc’s sister. Not much more than an hour earlier Sartre and Camus had been knocked over in the men’s doubles, and nothing sharpens the de Beauvoir game more than a setback to JPS. The auguries had all been attended to.
The first set lasted thirty-four minutes, Arendt breaking serve at 3–3 and holding the break. In the second set de Beauvoir lost some of her focus. She missed a lot of shots wide and she double-faulted to lose her serve at 4–4. She broke back immediately with some courageous net-play but Arendt was not to be denied and came back again, winning the match with three glorious forehands, two down the line and one across court, to complete a stunning anti-climax.
‘I had a match plan,’ explained de Beauvoir, ‘and I followed it. The plan was worked out by my coach, based on how we thought we could win, and my job was simply to put the plan into action.’
‘Here was this great woman,’ said Arendt. ‘A woman who has assumed legendary status in our minds, in whom we have invested ideas and characteristics of our own, for our own reasons. And here she was now, on her own, a person like anyone else. It was, in the end, a perfectly ordinary tennis match.’
What had Arendt expected?
‘It wasn’t just me,’ she said. ‘It was everyone. We expected something bigger, something mythic; Roman perhaps, Greek, I don’t know. I don’t think the reality was disappointing. She was an individual, doing her job.’
‘She was full of shit,’ said Nelson Algren from the players’ box.
There was further criticism of the plan to clean up the game. ‘The WTO is weak,’ Mary McCarthy told the French media. ‘If the central governing body is weak, ambitious member federations will do what they want. The rules need to be clear and they need to be policed. It’s no use waiting for a problem to fester and then trying to put a bandage on it.’
Others think the tournament has revealed what is going on in some of the member federations but that little can be done about it.
‘It’s hopeless,’ said Strindberg. ‘Hopeless and completely pointless.’
‘It’s not hopeless,’ said Heidegger. ‘It’s also none of the WTO’s affair. German tennis is as good as any tennis in the world. A lot of this is jealousy.’
‘A lot of what is jealousy?’
‘I forget,’ said Heidegger, ‘but I’m sure I’m right.’
Roland Barthes thought these questions were irrelevant. ‘The significant thing is not that tennis was hijacked by totalitarianism,’ he said, ‘but that it has survived. Look at the players who are left in the draw. The only Germans left in the singles are Mann, a stalwart critic of the German administration, and Hannah Arendt, who has left the country. The only Russians are Chekhov and Anna Akhmatova, the most subtle articulator of the Russian malaise and the great surviving dissident.’
He wasn’t finished. ‘The only Americans are Waller, who isn’t even allowed in certain toilets in America, Lardner, whose son has just appeared before the House American Tennis Unhearings and SuperTom, who lives in England. The only Englishman left is Orwell, who has never even been approached to play Davis Cup and lives on an island off the coast of Scotland.’
The other two are Joyce, whose matches are not allowed to be broadcast in Ireland, despite the fact that they are full of meticulously assembled shots he remembers having seen there as a child, and Duchamp, the mocker of everything French tennis stands for.
Day 32
Lardner v. Duchamp • Mann v. Eliot • Auden and MacNeice v. Chandler and Hammett • Astaire and Rogers v. Wilding and Elliott • Freud and Klein v. Beckett and Guggenheim
Chekhov and Duchamp have tough assignments in the next few days, with singles and doubles commitments. So too do doubles partners Arendt and Akhmatova in action against each other on Friday for the right to play Millay in the women’s singles final.
Also busy with doubles are Beckett, Maxine Elliott and Katherine Mansfield, and all three are still in the mixed.
The first of the men’s quarter-finals pitted Lardner against Marcel Duchamp. Both are capable of beating anyone. To get here, Lardner has knocked out the moody Glenn Miller, Nabokov in straight sets, Chaplin in the upset of the round, Ted Cummings and the Mississippi mauler, Bill Faulkner.
Lardner has been the underdog in every match he has
