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The grand slam circuit of tennis, that summit of herculean excellence, is upon us with the start of the Australian Open.
The scribblers will be able to jot down a few impressions about how distinct each ground is, be it the tempered, aristocratic grass of Wimbledon, or the challenging clay of Roland Garros.
The one thing that viewers should not neglect to do is to look at tennis beyond the screen.
“Something is lost when tennis is televised,” suggests Courtney Fisk in the Book Forum (Nov 3, 2011). “The ball becomes a blur of fuzz and neon, often shot in histrionic slow-mo.”
Neglected in the rapid fire of imagery are the wordsmiths, the writers who add a cerebral dimension to the ball’s momentum, the bruising physique, the court battle. Many of these observations, be they in novels, the short story or essays, find themselves in Tennis and the Meaning of Life, a 1995 literary anthology compiled by Jay Jennings.
A particularly good scribbler on ball and net is Martin Amis, who recalls the early days when he first encountered the sport, taking it up as a player, meeting such people as Harry, who was content with his bottle of port with breakfast, and the cumbersome Syd with ‘startlingly bandy legs’. Such figures are not paragons of tennis excellence. Harry was somewhat better than Syd in those stakes – he managed to give Amis sound advice “on groundstrokes, make a full circular swing [as] the ball starts its journey towards you.”
For Amis, the peaking of his prowess took place at 40, when he managed to perform “on the court like a warrior poet.” Amis himself dons the warrior’s armour with photogenic ease – he holds a racket, boasts a cigarette and is photographed “in a swamp” for the New York Magazine issue of May 29, 1995.
Then came the rather personal depiction of his relationship with the novelist Julian Barnes, a friendship that soured after Amis fired Barnes’s wife, his longtime agent Pat Kavanagh, after failing to secure a hefty advance of 500,000 pounds for The Information. The novel itself features two British novelists who are rivals in an assortment of sports – snooker, chess, and, of course, tennis. (A touch of Barnes here?)
There is the inevitable jab – a prominent novelist alongside the obscure, unknown writer. There is envy – much of it, in fact, but even the tennis gets a look in.
As a warrior writer, Amis and tennis seem a good match, a worthy union. When writing about the now retired Tim Henman, Amis would be witty. “He is the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all.” The name did everything to suggest an absence of “gravity”.
But Amis is by no means the only one to use tennis as the forum for antics for which it becomes the perfect context. Back in time, as World War II is raging, we find Brendan Gill’s piece in the New Yorker on a seventy-year old tennis-playing nun (habit and all) by the name of Mother Coakley. Things are to be kept strictly on court.
The game of tennis becomes a suitable medium to read society.
It is the escapist platform for the raw and erotic, depicted in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, or it a battleground featuring Attic-styled soldiers, a feature of ancient Greek drama, in the poems of Osip Mandelstam, a poet banned and condemned by Stalin’s regime.
The new tennis season also enables one to think of the mathematical mania that the game conjures up.
The late polymath Davis Foster Wallace felt strongly about it. Reading his account of the game in ‘Tennis, Trigonometry and Tornadoes’ is much like embarking on a trip into a geometrical structure, a sequence of fine latticework designs that bind player and ball.
Shots are examined with forensic, almost laboured detail. In his prose on tennis, characters are pictured with picture perfect summation – Roger Federer, for Wallace, was “Mozart and Metallica”, Jakob Hlasek that “Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell.”
The more one consults the literature on tennis, the more one is impressed by how people react to the activity that goes on within a very defined and enclosed space of action for a short period of time.
“We step out on the green rectangle in moonlight”, describes Galway Kinnell in the poem ‘On the Tennis Court at Night’. “The lines glow, which for many have been the only lines of justice.” Or, as others might feel, injustice.
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