Frayn Benedict Nightingale On Form by Mike Brearley William Joll
WILLIAM JOLL
On Form By Mike Brearley Little, Brown £20.00 Oldie price £14.22 inc p&p
At the outset, let me explain: I am a tremendous fan of Mike Brearley, and here’s why.
I lost touch with Test cricket in the late 1970s when based abroad (it had fallen out of fashion in the Bois de Boulogne), but returned to find Botham at full throttle. So they made him English captain, at which he was no good – and
he lost form. After the Lord’s Test in the 1981 Ashes series, in which Botham failed to score twice, he was replaced by Brearley and – hallelujah – by a narrow margin and against all the odds, England beat Australia at Headingley in spectacular fashion. Thanks to the exceptional efforts of the two English fastmen (Graham Dilley with the bat and Bob Willis, who took eight wickets in an innings), Botham back on Herculean form, and Brearley as deus ex machina, it was game on.
On Form, which is partly exploration, partly exposition and partly digression (including a nine-page description of the working methodology of a tree surgeon from western India) of and around ‘form’ itself, is also concerned with psychoanalysis and philosophy. Although it has no easily discernible progression – and contains enough material to furnish Brearley with several future books – it is clearly derived from the author’s professional experiences, and incorporates material from talks given to such diverse audiences as the 1952 Club, the Sports Forum, the Budleigh Salterton Festival, the BM Institute of Mental Health in Ahmedabad, a Hawks’ Club dinner, a conference in Paris held by the International Artist Managers’ Association, and a Chipping Camden literary lunch.
The tone is conversational rather than literary and, while this makes the text more accessible, Brearley is sometimes dogmatic and sometimes obscurantist. Thus we are told that Bradman was ‘the greatest cricketer ever’ – I think
I would have preferred to have Sobers on my team. In the course of speculating about attitudes, Brearley writes, ‘Puzzling changes in social and political attitudes – for instance, a popular shift to the right combined with widespread conviction that social difficulties in the country are a result of excessive immigration – may have their roots in a deep sense of neglect by the powers-that-be.’ Does this mean that people may vote UKIP because their desires are being ignored by the current government? If so, I am delighted not to be a psephologist.
For the most part, if one is prepared to accept his methodology, Brearley carries his many threads aloft, but there are occasions when I had to demur. Discussing the relationship between frames and pictures they contain, Brearley cites Howard Hodgkin (whose frames are extensions of the pictures themselves): ‘Hodgkin, for instance, was like all of us born into a certain artistic culture; he was taught and became familiar with particular styles of painting. He developed his own style against the background of paradigms of what was felt to constitute good or great art.’ Here the terms of reference are way too loose to reinforce his point and Hodgkin a notably poor example of a painter influenced by ‘paradigms’, coming, as he did, from a cultural background of extreme diversity.
Writing about passivity, Brearley discusses Bartleby, a masterly late novella by Melville: Bartleby is a law scrivener, employed by a member of the professional classes in New York. It is true that Bartleby does become passive – to the point of being inert – but Melville’s real interest here is the effect that this has on the employer, whose form does come to be affected. When it comes to Tolstoy – and the marvellous description of the shooting party in Anna Karenina, where Levin is forced by Oblonsky to take him and Veslovsky (a gadfly, it would seem, but not above flirting with Kitty), away shooting for a couple of days – Brearley fills us in with many of Veslovsky’s annoyances. But he does not explain fully that Levin’s loss of form is caused by overpowering jealousy.
Brearley has not been well-served by his publisher. There are no footnotes or captions to the illustrations – crazy in a book which draws on an exceptionally wide frame of reference. The standard of editing (including punctuation) is lamentable, although Brearley himself comments that he may be lucky to have had a copy editor. Maybe; but, in a book of such length, the cumulative irritation is considerable.