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For years, one of the most pleasurable things about the parish magazine I am sent from my home town has been the monthly book review by a retired bishop. It is about 350 words long and his range of reading is impressive: at one end, shortish religious books for the season, or Justin Welby’s Dethroning Mammon, at the other Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, Julian Barnes… The bishop certainly does not shy from the disturbing and visceral.
I have always admired the elegant economy of his reviews. They give you a succinct sense of what the book is about, they are quietly empathetic in that they address how you the reader might find the book, and they administer criticism with perfect manners. In short, they always come across as open-minded and objective.
Until, unfortunately, this month. His review of the above book is the longest I have seen by him, it falls apart, and it is almost entirely subjective. I am quite shocked. Even a cursory glance at the page reveals that the commonest word on it is ‘I’. This is because, although ‘we missed each other in Oxford’, the bishop ‘sat on the same red benches in Westminster’ as Cowdrey, he is ‘of Cowdrey’s generation’, he knows the Kent County Cricket set, and Cowdrey and he had ‘a devotion to cricket only just short of the spiritual’. The first half of his review is full of that kind of thing, rather than telling us about the book.
Then we get down to it:
I have a criticism of the author. It is true that, thanks to the Cowdrey family, he had access to personal diaries of Colin, so there are some fascinating things here [please give us at least one example] which have never been published before. That makes it a worthwhile enterprise in itself. But surprisingly for an English master at a prominent public school there are one or two elementary mistakes [not many, then]. […] As a first class cricketer himself some of the descriptions read like dressing room banter and sometimes like an autobiography of the biographer [rather like this review?]. That may add a light touch but it produces a deficit of depth. The measure of a man is more than the sum of his achievements and certainly Colin Cowdrey, like the rest of us, is an enigma. A really penetrating biographer will attempt to decode that enigma.
What has led the good bishop to this uncharacteristic literary pontification? The answer, I fear, lies in that phrase ‘devotion to cricket only just short of the spiritual’. I cannot help feeling that he has been elegant and restrained in all his previous reviews because there was nothing in those books, even the ‘spiritual’ ones, that he could ever get as worked up about as cricket! But the ‘spiritual’ reasserts itself in the wonderful backhanded compliment of his final sentence following on from my quotation: ‘Andrew Murtagh is probably too nice a man to dare to do that.’ OmG.
There is a serious issue here. In literary terms what the bishop has done isn’t cricket. Literary reviews shouldn’t be autobiographical or self-focussed. That would be boring and unprofitable for the reader. The reviewer’s commitment must be to the book they are reviewing and to the reader who might consider buying it. (Pardon this passing pontification.) If you ask another ‘expert’ in the field to review a book, s/he will probably rubbish it for a variety of purely personal reasons. You don’t want someone with their axe to grind, you want the sense of a well-read, independent, objective judge.
I am sure the bishop will recover his poise in next month’s issue, but I think we all need to keep Richard Steele’s words ringing in our ears: ‘It is great vanity to think anyone will attend to a thing because it is your quarrel.’
Well, Patrick, as England toil against Pakistan in the Test (though at least Kent have the beating of Glamorgan in the one-day game in Canterbury), let us indeed talk cricket. And Colin Cowdrey. Because here – take care! – you are speaking about my boyhood hero, and even a comment on a review on a book about the man (gentleman?), takes me back to the early fifties when I thrived or suffered by his success or failure at the wicket. I can recall now, and shiver slightly, the night when I crept downstairs in a cold house at 3 or 4 am to listen to the commentary from Australia; and the elation (the bishop would call it a visionary experience) when Cowdrey scored his first test century, 102 out of England’s total of 191. I won sixpence on a bet with a schoolfriend on this. It was Cowdrey’s doings for Kent and England that kept me cheerful in those not always very glorious days. The time he scored a century in each innings for Kent against the touring Australians, and Kent were within a whisker of beating them. (I use this as a buttress against the time I sat thunderstruck in the stand at Blackheath, as Kent were bowled out for 72 before lunch by Surrey; Godfrey Evans, if you please, scoring 50. At least Dave Halfyard scattered Peter May’s stumps later in the day, as a partial consolation). In those days I used to cycle – later, motorcycle – to all the Kent grounds: Dartford, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, Canterbury. I could truly say, with Wordsworth, ‘for me/It was a time of rapture.’ When I was in France in the summer of 54, I cycled every day into Blois to buy a newspaper just for the cricket scores; my host family realized that English eccentricity set in early. And so you see, the bishop is not too far off with his spiritual assessment of the game; cricket did and presumably still does this to people…though I must say the modern game has gone a bit dead on me, personally, and I hardly remember the rules.
Not much about biography here, I’m afraid; but just as there is a tide in the affairs of man that leads on to fortune, there is a time also when we are so susceptible to the stature and capacities of someone, that unconditional ‘worship’ becomes the right term, and any attempt at objectivity is completely pointless.
Must get back to the test match, and check if Kent have pulled it off…
Dear Damian, please excuse the delayed reaction, but it has taken me a little while to return from the world of lyrical remembrance that your Comment has transported me to…
I too visited Canterbury Cricket Ground in the 1950s (with my grandfather, who had once see W.G. Grace bowl there)… And this is why I so eagerly sought some hint of revelation, or at least edifying information, in the bishop’s ‘review’. But it has now occurred to me that the bishop deliberately withheld all that in order to incite us. Murtagh’s biography of Cowdrey can’t possibly be as useless as the bishop implies, so the only way to find out more is to buy it!
Patrick: the lyrical impulse cannot be resisted…
Your grandfather saw WG
Grace (bearded) bowl at Canterbury.
Were there flags in the famous tree?
And was there honey still for tea?
(I couldn’t get Cowdrey in there as a rhyme, because he’s an iamb rather than a trochee.)
Damian
Yes indeed, Damian, my grandfather is one of my direct lines to the pre-1914 ‘idyll’… But before Wisdenians assure me that W.G. never bowled at Canterbury, I should perhaps stress that my grandfather was describing to me W.G. emerging from the pub outside the ground after having had a few, being challenged by someone to bowl straight in that condition, and clean bowling the challenger on a hastily improvised wicket.