by Arunabha Sengupta
“Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England — it is nowhere near so popular as football, for instance — but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value ‘form’ or ‘style’ more highly than success.”
The last part of the above sentence written by George Orwell will be celestial music to all the cricketing romantics. What he says above, and in the bit that follows, is bound to resonate with the huge proportion of fans who would rather wax eloquent about intangible qualities of their favourite heroes rather than come face to face with their flaws in scorecards and average tables.
“In the eyes of any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be ‘better’ (i.e. more elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs.”
While it is debatable whether those blinkered eyes belong to the true cricket-lover or not, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm does capture the sentiment of many. He does not stop there. In this essay titled Raffles and Miss Blandish, he adds, much in the vein of a Cardus or an AA Thomson:
“It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance, practised bodyline bowling in Australia he was not actually breaking any rule: he was merely doing something that was ‘not cricket’”
Of course, he takes the purist view of the game and is either ignorant about or chooses to ignore the enormous amount of skulduggery, fixing, tampering, haggling and all the uncouth business that went on in the game from time immemorial. Even when he says that cricket is not a modern game, he makes a bloomer. Unlike in 1984, his vision of the future is significantly askew.
“It is not a twentieth-century game, and nearly all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance, were at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in Germany before and after the last war.”
If we dig deep into facts— leaf through Field of Shadows for instance —we do realise that he has his facts correct as far as cricket in Germany is concerned.
And the rose tinted eyes of the romantic are in evidence when he brings Raffles into the picture.
“In making Raffles a cricketer as well as a burglar, Hornung was not merely providing him with a plausible disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he was able to imagine.”
Cricket is mentioned quite often in his works, but always in passing.
In Homage to Catalonia the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London is described with barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, men in bowler hats … In The English People, his book length composite essay, he dwells on many features of Englishness, including home cooking, solid junk, open fires , ideal pubs and village cricket.
In Coming up for Air, Orwell describes Old Porteous, a sort of 60-year-old Rupert Brooke, whose whole life was lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek and cricket. It is based on his own experiences at Eton.
While at Eton, his headmaster was Revd Cyril Alington, the author of Mr Evans —a Cricketo-Detective Story. Before that it had been Revd Edward Lyttelton, of the famous Lyttelton family and a member of MCC. Orwell never quite excelled in games and had no interest in any sport, but according to his own accounts he could survive in a cricket field if required.
True, he was not very fond of any sport.
In fact, for all his observations on the English character of form or style over success reflected in cricket, in his essay The Sporting Spirit he mentions: “I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles … Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited England in 1921.”
It was as the world hovered on the brink of the Second World War that Orwell trivialised cricket as he wrote with serious annoyance about the ensuing mayhem.
On 12 October 1938, the writer settled in Chez Madame Vellat, Marrakesh, was writing a letter to British socialist and essayist Jack Common. Talks between Hitler and Chamberlain were on and the letter dealt with the opinions of Orwell about the various ways that the atrocities could be avoided.
Towards the end of the letter, Orwell exploded while discussing the recent article of British journalist Kingsley Martin, which had just been published in the left-leaning political magazine the New Statesman.
Martin had suggested a series of conditions on which the Labour Party should support the Government in War. And Orwell scathingly wrote: “As though the Government would allow any conditions. The bloody fool seems to think war is a cricket match”
George Orwell was born on 25 June 1903.
Illustration: Maha