In 1961, the term untrustworthy narrator was coined in the book Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C Booth. It dealt with a narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised., so that when he narrates a fictional story in the first person—on some rare occasions the third person—we cannot know for sure whether he is truthful or not. It is a literary device. From The Confessions of Zeno to Rashomon, it has been used in various works of art.
1961. By then Neville Cardus was 72 or 73 depending on whether you believed him or the birth certificate. It is 2020 now. And even after all these years, a similar term for non-fiction has not been coined.
Non-fiction is not supposed to be narrated in an unreliable manner. Therefore the category non-fiction.
If one borrows heavily from historical characters and events and frames imaginary stories around them, they are variously categorised as historical fiction or mythology.
If a reporter does that in the guise of narrating events it is bad journalism and unethical.
However, Cardus did just that. From the tale of making his way up from an underprivileged impoverished birth, to magically hearing the words mumbled by Wilfred Rhodes and Emmott Robinson on the ground, most of what he wrote was made up.
And yet he is deified for that. Glorified, set up in an illusory throne from where he continues to muddle facts and—worse—encourages similar cavalier attitude towards facts and figures.
When pointed out that there is chicanery in the words, most worshippers—many who have grown up believing in his singular magnificence—respond that there was nothing wrong in what he did, namely to misreport and mislead generations. The basic tenets of substituting substance by style vanish behind the pink-tinted screens of hero-worship
Scientifically this heuristic is known as Conservatism in human information processing. Failure to accept that a long-held belief is wrong.
An example:
In Berlin, 1936, Jesse Owens, crossed the finishing line at 10.3 seconds, with fellow American Ralph Metcalfe arriving a tenth of a second later. The stop-motion camera system developed by the Zeiss Ikon and the Agfa companies were not required. Certainly not for Erich Borchmeyer, the 32-year-old German on whom the Führer had pinned his hopes. Owens won the gold in the 200m, long jump and the 4 x 100m relay as well. Adolf Hitler, however, has his own explanation: “People whose forefathers came from the jungle are primitive—more athletically built than civilised White people.”
Much easier than admitting that the long-held belief in superiority of the Aryan race was wrong.
Similarly, admitting that Cardus was a charlatan confusing generations of cricket followers with his manufactured version of events is difficult.
One can find detailed explanation of Conservatism of Human Information Processing in many a scientific elucidation, for example by Ward Edwards in Judgement under Uncertainty : Heuristics and Biases edited by Daniel Kanheman and Amos Tversky.
However, I don’t expect people intoxicated by the Cardusian fantasies for decades to actually devote time to those scholarly articles. Hell, they cannot be bothered to check the scorecards to ascertain whether he was speaking anything remotely close to the truth.
Let me add : I believe a large percent of them never read too many lines of Cardus either, apart from what they get to see through quick google searches, and some confirmation building quotes about Cardus that pop up elsewhere.
I will end with one story that underlines the fraudulence in whatever our man did. This was narrated to me by Stephen Chalke, a truly fantastic author with great respect for facts:
“I did a book with Geoffrey Howard (At the Heart of English Cricket). He managed some England tours in the 1950s. He was also the secretary at Old Trafford in the 1950s. He told the story of being on a train journey, sharing the compartment with a chap who was the leader of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. And the chap asked, ‘What do you think of Neville Cardus the writer?’ As you know, Cardus’ two great loves were cricket and classical music, he wrote about both for Manchester Guardian. Geoffrey said, ‘He’s a very good writer, but unfortunately he doesn’t know anything about cricket.’ And the chap said, ‘Oh, I thought it was music he didn’t know anything about.’”
I have written hundreds of thousands of words on Cardus and his manipulation of truth. However, when I set out to write this piece I promised less than 800 words. For one simple reason.
Through the last few years I have grown to believe that the people who sing his praises hardly read any serious work …
Neville Cardus was born on April 3, 1888. That is what the records say.
However, if one wants he is more than free to go on believing that he was born on April 2, 1889 as he claimed.