An addict's archive

The long history that cricket has had means that there is no dearth of good writing on the game. In a recently released book meant to be a definitive anthology and a tribute to the finest writers on cricket, RAMACHANDRA GUHA celebrates the best writing on the game. Exclusive extracts...

A DREAM I have every so often begins in an unfamiliar station where I have to change trains. I arrive in the morning, and the connection is in the early afternoon. After leaving my bags in the waiting room I set off in search of a second-hand bookstore. With the aid of an auto-rickshaw driver I find one. The shop is dimly lit, and with closely packed shelves. The owner is there, somewhere, but no words are exchanged. I must search this place thoroughly before I return to my train. Eyes racing, I espy a faded spine with "Cardus" written on it. The book is taken out and I turn the pages, to find that this is the first (1949) edition of the Autobiography. I turn to ask its price - and am woken up.

As a little boy, Neville Cardus' autobiography was for me indeed a forbidden fruit. I first encountered the work in my aunt's house in Delhi. The books in the house were all in one room, occupied by my Oxford-educated cousin. He was to me what Robert was to William in the Richmal Crompton stories - a lofty elder sibling who forbade me from coming near his cigarettes, his books or his girl-friends. His mother, who worshipped him, had also warned me off his room. My cousin went to work but my aunt stayed at home, and in any case I was a timid child. I entered the room only rarely and fleetingly: altogether, I must have fingered the Autobiography for a mere five or ten minutes.

I had never before seen a book by Neville Cardus. But I knew already that he was the Don Bradman of cricket writers. I must have read of him in one of the first books I owned, Keith Miller's Cricket Crossfire (the two were friends, for the fast bowler, like the scribe, had an abiding passion for classical music). He also peeped in and out of the works of A.A. Thomson, two of whose books my father had found for me in a bookstore in Delhi's Connaught Circus. Thomson was an accomplished writer himself, at his best in remembering the Yorkshire cricketers of his boyhood. From him I learned that a lover of cricket must find a club or county before he finds a country.

For a middle-class cricket-mad boy in the India of the 1960s, building a library was much like assembling in innings on a bowler's wicket - a run from here and a run from there, and no easy pickings. Some books from England found their way to the local stores, but they were always extravagantly priced. In the time it took to save money to buy them, the pound had grown twice as strong against the rupee. Easier to obtain were the ghosted autobiographies which Indian publishers were willing to commission or reprint. That is how I got the Keith Miller, and that is how I came to read - and reread - Denis Compton's End of an Innings and Syed Mushtaq Ali's Cricket Delightful. Even so, I could tell literature apart from propaganda, the first-hand evocations of A.A. Thomson from the carelessly remembered achievements of the star as retold by his ghost.

I grew up, to discover the second-hand bookstores. These included the pavement sellers in Delhi, a town I went to study in, and the charming Select Bookshop in Bangalore, a town I visited every summer to see my grandparents. My collection got a ferocious fillip in my second year at university, when Delhi hosted its first World Book Fair. The fair was held at the new Pragati Maidan (loosely translated, "The Grounds of Progress"). My pocket money had increased - my father had recently been awarded a promotion - while an adoring (and cricket-playing) uncle unilaterally offered an additional 50 rupees a month. It was the capital at its most glorious: winter, the sun out, a clear view of the Purana Qila, and the music of the great shehnai player Bismillah Khan. Walking through the fair, I came upon a shop with rows upon rows of cricket books. (This was Prabhu Book Service of Gurgaon, known to all foreign historians of India). The books had once belonged to a couple named Indumathi and Piyush Diwan. They were many and various, and had the owners' names stamped on the first page. I bought several autobiographies of older cricketers (Lord Harris and S.M.J. Woods, among others), Pelham Warner's history of Lord's Cricket Ground, and more of the sentimental studies of A.A. Thomson. Unhappily, I did not have the money at hand to buy C.B. Fry's classic book on batsmanship. To my surprise, there weren't any books by Neville Cardus. It seems that the Diwan heir who sold away the family jewellery knew the worth of that particular design.

It was also at the 1976 World Book Fair, but at an open stall outside the main hall, that I picked up a reprint of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary. It cost me four rupees. I had already read the book (a copy lay in my college library), and have read it almost every year since. It must surely be the greatest work written on any sport. It has spawned an extensive and mostly tedious critical literature, which I have no wish to add to. Suffice it to say that years later, when my first child was born, and I returned from the hospital to an empty home where the enormity of the event hit me, I read, as consolation and stimulation, my favourite chapter from Beyond a Boundary.

The James was the only volume I retained when in 1980 I disposed of my cricket books. I had begun a Ph.D. in sociology in Calcutta, and converted to Marxism. Books were property, and property (I now understood) was theft. Besides, cricket and other sports were pursuits that kept the masses away from the class struggle. Sensibly, I did not sell the collection but identified a suitable person to give it to. This was Mudar Patherya, a talented young cricket writer then with the Telegraph of Calcutta. I met him, briefly explained the collection's strengths, and obtained his consent to paying the freight charges from my home in northern India. For 750 rupees Mr. Patherya came into the possession of what might have been among the most hard won of all cricket libraries.

As it happened, in a year or two I was rid of Marxism and had returned to cricket. In Delhi on a research visit, I found the National Archives closed on account of a festival. Returning to my uncle's, I switched on the television and found that a Test match was on and that my boyhood hero, G.R. Viswanath, was batting on 60 not out. Watching cricket led, inevitably, to once again reading about it. The habit had proved impossible to kick.

In rebuilding my library, I now knew which books were worth having and which ones could be ignored. I also had more money - money of my own. Through my work, I came to travel more within India, thus to draw upon the shaded stalls of Bombay's Flora Fountain, as well as the shops that come up every Sunday on the sands of the Sabarmati River, under Ellis Bridge in Ahmedabad. I also came to travel overseas and visit the specialist second-hand cricket bookseller, a species unknown in my country. I have spent money at J.W. McKenzie's shop in Surrey and Martin Wood's in Kent, and also (my own favourite place) in Roger Page's store on Tarcoola Drive, in MacLeod, a suburb of that great cricketing city Melbourne.

There remain some gems from the original holdings that have not yet been replaced. Meanwhile, Mr. Patherya himself has abandoned cricket. After writing two or three books on the sport, he has become a successful trader in stocks and shares. On my next visit to Calcutta I must make a bid for his (or my) collection.

I shall now enumerate, for the benefit of the reader, 50 fine books on the game. To choose a cricket eleven is to invite dispute, and so it is with a cricket library. Asked by a friend which 10 books he should buy to begin his collection, A.A. Thomson answered, "John Nyren's A Cricketers' Tutor, Altham and Swanton's A History of Cricket and any eight of Cardus". I have five times as many slots to play with, and yet, the first two of Thomson's recommendations do not figure in my list at all.

I will begin with authors rather than titles, with the acknowledged masters of cricket writing. James presents no problem, since only two books have appeared under his name: Beyond a Boundary, which was first published in 1963 - the year Frank Worrell led his West Indian side on a triumphant march through the grounds of England - and Cricket, a collection of fugitive pieces lovingly put together 23 years later by his assistant, Anna Grimshaw. Jack Fingleton wrote more books, but two clearly stand out: his first-person account of bodyline, Cricket Crisis (1946), and The Masters of Cricket (1958), a collection of portraits of contemporaries and heroes. His compatriot Ray Robinson wrote half a dozen books of roughly equal worth. If one cannot have them all, one might make do with Between Wickets (1946), a fact-filled analysis of cricket between the wars, and his last book, On Top Down Under, a cheerful roam through the careers of the men who have captained Australia (first published in 1976, this book reappeared in 1998, updated by Gideon Haigh).

What then of Cardus? He certainly wrote more than eight books, but I am not an Englishman, and must set against his undoubted genius the claims of geographical correctness. Perhaps one can allow him three. The Autobiography, of course, and with it The Essential Neville Cardus, also printed in 1949, the essays chosen with care by his publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis. Reprinted here are pieces from his books of the 1920s and 1930s - Cardus at his freshest: anecdotal, worshipful and breathless. To go with it I would recommend Close of Play (1956), a more meditative and, dare one say, mature work.

Sports literature is dominated by biographies and autobiographies, the former of uneven quality, the latter not often written by the person whose name appears on the title page. Lives of great cricketers published in recent years are long on gossip and short on analysis. Things were once otherwise. I think for example of Gerald Howat's 1975 biography of the first great black cricketer, Learie Constantine, a book which subtly weaves anecdote with social history, or of Irving Rosenwater's study of Don Bradman (1978), a dispassionate and heavily numbered analysis of the record-breaking batsman. Alongside Rosenwater one could read, and buy beforehand, Brightly Fades the Don (1949), Jack Fingleton's account of Bradman's remarkable last tour of England.

The Don was the most phenomenal of all cricketers, possibly excepting W.G. Grace. In England, where there is a perennial interest in Victoriana, there is a fresh book on Grace published almost every year. I prefer to all of these the warm remembrance of Bernard Darwin. W.G. Grace, printed in 1934, is written by a supreme stylist who made his name writing about another sport (golf). The modern cricketer who has resembled Grace in the expansiveness of his personality is surely Frederick Sewards Trueman. John Arlott's Fred: Portrait of a Fast Bowler (1971) is a wonderful evocation of the bowler and man, by one who spent much time with his subject in pub and commentary box. Three other lives by English writers shall go on to my short list - David Foot's Harold Gimblett (1982), a Somerset man writing with love and despair about a tormented Somerset hero; Leslie Duckworth's S.F. Barnes (1970), the life of a truly great bowler who chose to play in the obscurity of the leagues rather than for Lancashire and England; and Simon Wilde's Ranji: A Genius Rich and Strange (1990), a superb warts-and-all recollection of the Indian prince who played for Sussex and England.

The finest of all cricket autobiographies is unquestionably Arthur Mailey's 10 for 66 and All That (1958), the tale of a lowly mechanic whose playing skills allowed him to meet kings and prime ministers and to befriend Sir James Barrie and Neville Cardus. Mailey was a natural wit and a gifted artist (the book carries his illustrations), and had strong views on the game besides. Not as strong, however, as the views of Bill O'Reilly, another in the long line of Australian googly bowlers who have made mincemeat of English batsmen. His Tiger: Sixty Years in Cricket (1985) is unsparing in its criticisms of the modern game. But it also contains lovely memories of life and sport in the bush, including a chapter (reproduced in this anthology) on O'Reilly's first encounter with Don Bradman. Among the English contributions to this genre I shall select Bill Bowes's Express Deliveries (1958), which is reliably known not to have been written by a ghost. This is an account of professional cricket as seen by a hard-boiled Yorkshireman whose first job was as a net bowler at Lord's. Add to that Ian Peebles' Spinner's Yarn (1977), by a contemporary of Bowes who came from further north (Scotland), and whose route to Test cricket lay instead through The Parks at Oxford.

Some of the best memoirists have been less than world-class players themselves. R.C. Robertson-Glasgow's 46 Not Out (1948) displays in abundance the love for the game of a fast bowler who appeared, if not with a great deal of success, for Oxford University and for Somerset. It must be read alongside Bernard Hollowood's Cricket on the Brain (1970), by a celebrated cartoonist and former editor of Punch, who played in the tough northern leagues and for Staffordshire in the Minor County Championship. Rounding off this group is Sujit Mukherjee's Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (1996), about life in a complete cricketing backwater, the eastern Indian state of Bihar.

Mukherjee's principal reputation lies outside cricket, as a literary historian. Two other men of letters who adored cricket - although they played it with even less distinction - were Edmund Blunden and Ronald Mason. Blunden's Cricket Country (1944), published in the depths of war, is a joyous exercise in escapism. Mason's Batsman's Paradise (1955) is likewise a moving personal account of what the game and its icons meant to a bookish English boy.

To move now from the idiosyncratic to the encyclopaedic, from books that foreground one person to those that pretend to a greater comprehensiveness. If one is looking for a single-volume history of cricket, then Altham and Swanton, I am afraid, must give way to Rowland Bowen's Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development throughout the World (1970), a magnificently learned work which is less Anglocentric and far richer in sociological insight. Those of a more technical bent should supplement Bowen with Gerald Brodribb's Next Man In (first published in 1952, then in an updated edition in 1985), which is a delightful look at the origins of the game's laws and customs.

In terms of player strength and commercial robustness Australia has been, for some time now, the leading cricket nation of the world. The recently published Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket (1996) presents an authoritative and always readable account of the game in that country. There are no comparable books, I fear, on other lands, but their partisans can make do with the Wisden Book of Cricketers' Lives (1986), compiled by Benny Green from the obituary section of the great almanack, a little outdated, but with 8,614 entries nonetheless. Collective biography is also how one would describe David Frith's book The Fast Men (1975; revised edition 1977), with its companion volume on The Slow Men (1984). I recommend these strongly, for the author probably knows more cricket facts than any man alive, and because in these books he celebrates cricket's underpaid proletarians. Batsmen are the glamour boys of the game, who are paid more, profiled more, and rewarded more. When Len Hutton was knighted, back in 1956, Arthur Mailey congratulated him but added, "I hope next time it is a bowler - the last one to be knighted was Sir Francis Drake".

For the visually minded, I commend Cricket Cartoons and Caricatures (1989), by George Plumptre, and The Art of Cricket (1983), by Robin Simon and Alastair Smart, both of which range deep and wide and reproduce their selections well. Alas, there is no comparable book on cricket photography (a casualty, one suspects, of royalty payments). Also worth possessing is Lord's and Commons (1988), edited by John Bright-Holmes, which focuses exclusively on cricket fiction. Wodehouse at the Wicket (1998), edited by Murray Hedgecock, shall be placed next to it. This brings together all that the master humourist published on cricket, prefaced by a superlative introduction by the editor.

Of the many anthologies preceding this one, I can bring myself to recommend Alan Ross's A Cricketer's Companion (second enlarged edition 1979), compiled by a man who was born in India, who played cricket for Oxford, who wrote his first book about Australia, and who is a notable poet besides. Ross, whom some reckon to be the last great cricket writer, published in 1999 a selection of his writings over four decades, called (after a line of Tennyson on the county of Sussex) Green Fading into Blue.

Ross chooses, in his old age, to privilege his identification with Sussex. The county has been to him what Lancashire once was to Cardus, or Yorkshire to A.A. Thomson. For an Indian, himself living in a vaster and altogether more diverse land, what is truly amazing about English literature is its love of place. The flowers, trees and rivers, so much smaller and less colorful, are written about with a detail and emotional intensity absent in our own literature. Happily, cricket has been a prime beneficiary of English localism. In 1946 Dudley Carew wrote To the Wicket, a delightful ramble through the counties and their cricketers. Then in 1961 A.A. Thomson published A Cricket Bouquet, another lovely book, whose 17 chapters end with all-time county elevens. A quarter of a century later Tim Heald brought out The Character of Cricket, which differed only in focusing more on the atmosphere of county grounds rather than on their players. The most celebrated of these grounds is the subject of Pelham Warner's Lord's: 1787-1945 (1946), written by one who captained Middlesex and England - the former to the County Championship, the latter to an Ashes victory in Australia - founded the Cricketer magazine and was (need it be said?) president of the MCC as well. No one knew Lord's better than Warner. His book is suffused with love and knowledge; it is the one volume currently with Mr. Patherya I most wish I had back with me.

Eight places remain, and I shall fill them with some of my own favourites. Great Australian Cricket Stories (1982), edited by Ken Piese, is a massive collection of tales epic and small. Alan Gibson's The Cricket Captains of England (1976) wears its research lightly; it is almost as informative as, and possibly better written than, the comparable book by Ray Robinson. Gibson's Growing Up with Cricket contains memories of cricket played and cricketers watched in Essex and Oxford; the tone is urbane, the wit dry. By contrast the style is extravagant and the stories are risqu in Michael Parkinson's Cricket Mad (1969), set in Yorkshire, and another well-thumbed book of mine. Another most readable book by a fan is Rowland Ryder's Cricket Calling (1995), written in his eighties by a man who grew up in Edgbaston Cricket Ground (where his father worked), and whose memories stretched all the way back to Warwick Armstrong's 1921 Australian side.

Among biographies, I can offer Ashley Mallet's Grimmett (1993), a good Australian spin bowler remembering a better. The finest book on the loveliest of cricket arts is probably Trevor Bailey and Fred Trueman's The Spinners' Web (1988), which chronicles the varying styles and achievements of the slow bowlers the authors watched or played against (Bailey certainly wrote his sections; Trueman possibly spoke his). I am allowed, I think, to end with a fellow countryman writing about other fellow countrymen. Sujit Mukherjee's The Romance of Indian Cricket (1968) pays proper tribute to a generation of great Indian cricketers always ignored abroad and since superseded at home by the Tendulkars and Gavaskars.

Fifty is a number whose cricketing significance is restricted only to the pyjama game. But 11 is too few, and a 100 would take too much time - and stretch the budget. The list offered here is the product of a lifelong addiction and a deeply felt cosmopolitanism. My experience may even be unique; I know no one else who has had to build his collection of cricket books twice over. Happily, the second one is still growing.

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