Thin-Spun Runs

Admiring the "good grammar" of a cricket player's batting, the Manchester Guardian's scholarly Neville Cardus once called the batsman, a Lancashireman named Watson, "the [Samuel] Johnson of cricket." Demanded outraged Cricketer Watson: "Who did this bloke Johnson play for?"

Players are often baffled by the allusions that Neville Cardus, who usually lugs a good book along to the cricket field, chips into his cameo-chiseled reports on Britain's national game. Slight, myopic Cardus is probably the world's only cricket critic who also doubles in brass and woodwinds as a music reviewer. For 30 years, in covering his "strange dichotomy," first for the Guardian and now for the Kemsley newspapers (the Sunday Times, the Sunday Chronicle), Cardus has played a deft prose symphony of his own that weaves through both his fields the tonal majesty of one, the rhythmic action of the other. The result bewitches more readers than it baffles.

Last week Cardus fans all over Britain could admire his virtuosity in both specialties. A new anthology, The Essential Neville Cardus (Jonathan Cape; 12 s. 6 d.), was selling at the impressive rate of 1,000 copies a week.

Fresh Flavors. In one of the book's 45 essays, Cardus compares Dr. W. G. Grace, the bearded, burly Babe Ruth of cricket who scored 54,986 runs in 43 years, to Prime Minister Gladstone, Violinist Fritz Kreisler, Bach and Falstaff; he surmises that even the champion's name was foreordained ("Could Grace conceivably have [played like] Grace, known as W. G. Blenkinsop?").

Of Frank Woolley of Kent, another of the game's immortals, Cardus writes: "His cricket is compounded of soft airs and fresh flavors. The bloom of the year is on it [and] the very brevity of summer is in it ... Woolley, so the statisticians tell us, often plays a long innings. But time's a cheat . . . The brevity in Woolley's batting is a thing of pulse and spirit, not to be checked by clocks, but only to be apprehended by imagination. He is always about to lose his wicket; his runs are thin-spun ... An innings by him is almost too unsubstantial for this world."

Reviewing Cardus, the Guardian was moved to a flattering comparison: "Where would Homer's gods and heroes ... be without Homer, now?"

Musical Kidneys. Cricket's Homer, a self-described bastard, was born 54 years ago in a Manchester slum. His buxom mother and her two sisters took in laundry until they learned that taking lovers was more rewarding; Neville was one of the rewards. His father, whom he never knew, was first violinist in an orchestra.

Imaginative, sensitive, scarecrow-thin Neville had only four years of school, "a place of darkness and inhumanity." The public library was his university: "I discovered Charles Dickens and went crazy. I read at meals. I read under the [street] lamps. I read myself to [acute] myopia."

Cardus clerked for an insurance firm, learned cricket beside a rubbish dump and set himself a course of reading that would have floored an Oxford don. After listening to a light opera one evening, he discovered that his mind "retained music as the kidneys secrete water." (Now, after reading in bed at night, Cardus switches off the lamp, selects some favorite composition from his head and conducts an imaginary concert before falling asleep.)

In his spare time, young Cardus imitated the austere wit of the Guardian's reviews of the arts, hoping to write for it himself. In 1917, after four years of batting and bowling as assistant cricket coach at Shrewsbury School, Cardus got his wish. The Guardian's Editor C. P. Scott hired him as a reporter, and Cardus stayed on the paper for 22 years.

Inside Lights. Subbing for the first-string music critic, Cardus once heard a Russian tenor sing Nekrasov's The Wanderer. Wrote Cardus: "At the passage where we hear the piteous lamentation of the starving peasant, [his] face was as though a light had been turned down inside; at the cry 'Cold! Cold!' the cheeks . . . became sunken; the body contracted as though intensely chilled, the hands clenched, and, surely, the voice itself was pinched ... An eloquent animation, almost sculptural."

Editor Scott was impressed, promised Cardus the top music spot. But Cardus, never robust, suffered a breakdown. To get him out in the fresh air, the paper sent him to cover the first postwar (1919) cricket matches at the Old Trafford field. He hit a century, and the Guardian appointed him regular "Cricketer."

Though he would rather write about batons than bats, Cardus thinks that cricket expresses, in microcosm, the whole English character. "If everything else in this nation of ours were lost but cricket," he writes, "it would be possible to reconstruct [from it] all the eternal Englishness which has gone to the establishment of [the] Constitution and the laws . . ."

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