FOOTBALL’S PLACE IN N.Z. NOVELS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1033, 25 July 1930, Page 16

FOOTBALL’S PLACE IN N.Z. NOVELS

1 W ritzcn for The San. j WHEN the ideal New Zealand novel is written it will surely contain at least one account of a Rugby football match. There are few phenomena without a precedent, and the fictitious football match would be no novelty. The writer, whoever he or she may be, will be guided, to some extent, by tho precedents. In the literature of the Motherland references to Rugby football are not so plentiful as references to cricket, which, after all, is the national game of England. Dickens and Meredith, who both recounted an imaginary cricket match in the course of writing their novels, have not, so far as I remember, given a place in any chapter to the jame which is celebrated in “Tom Brown’s School Days.” It is to Hughes, that the writer will instinctively turn. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that descriptions of the game are confined entirely to school stories. One naturally expects to find a Rugby match described in at least twenty-five per cent, of the accredited school stories. A game is described in Kipling's “Stalky and Co.”, and Sir Henry Newbolt in a little known novel called “The Trynans” described a Rugby football match played at Clifton, where the Rugby game has been the rogue ever since the inception of that now famous nursery of great soldiers. Talbot Baines Reed gives at least one account of a match in which an old emuity disappears as one player places the ball in position, and another send 3 It over the cross-bar. The fictitious football match however, is not entirely confined to the school story. New 3 of the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reminds us of a story of his (less known perhaps than Sherlock Holmes, “Brigadier Gerard” or “The White Company") to wit "The Firm of Girdlestone” in which an international Rugby match is graphically described. Other instances will, doubtless, crowd to the mind of the reader. I know of no passage in which the poetry of the game is expressed with truer feeling than that in Mr Hugh Walpole’s poignant little study of a young man haunted by the primal fear of Cain. “Prelude to Adventure.” Incidentally this work contains one of the most authentic pictures of the inwardness of life at a University like Cambridge. ,lan Hay has described a boat race, and I have little doubt that, somewhere amid his prolific writings you will find a description of a Rugby football match. Now for a few suggestions to the potential New Zealand novelist. In the first place he must try to write like a novelist, not like a Journalist. He must avoid over elaboration of detail. He must beware of those phrases which are so dear to the heart of the man at the microphone. An effect is sometimes obtained by writing of a past event in the present lense. This expedient should be avoided by the writer who describes the football match. It is all very well for Carlyle to write of Frederick the Great in the present tense. Frederick was never described to the world at large by the man at the microphone. Then the writer is warned against making his hero too heroic. Truth is stranger than fiction, and, though it may be all very well for Mr Ivor Jones to win the match for his side in the last minute by intercepting a pass ten yards from his own line, and running to the other end of the field, your reader of fiction requires that his match on paper should not read like a fairy talc. To prohibit your hero from scoring a try, is perhaps, carrying realism to extremes. If he does score, let it not be in the face of probability. Here is a device for avoiding too much detail in one section. Let there be a retrospect by the hero in the manner of that popular picture of two decades or so back, entitled “The Captain" where we see the athlete of the afternoon ensconced before his fire with the curtains drawn. He is going over the match again in thought. Here. I suggest, is an opportunity for filling up the lacunae of the description in the previous chapter. There is no reason why the heroine should not be seated in the other chair. We are not slavishly bound down to “The Captain.” “How different it might have been, dearest,” she might be made to say “if you had tried to work the ‘blind side’ In that last ten minutes of the first spell.” “Yes, darling,” he might reply, “but I did work it in the first five minutes of the second, didn’t I?” The reader, of course, is cognisant ol this, and both his spirits and his memory are refreshed by the reference. The writer should indicate the general outlay of the ground in a far more subtle manner than that of the man at the microphone Remember Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: “Emotion recollected in tranquillity.” It is quite impossible for the man at the microphone to be tranquil. It is quite within the province of the latter, to record incidents that would not stand the acid test of printers’ ink. Some readers may here challenge the suggestion that printers’ ink is an acid. Let this be a warning to the novelist not to mix his metaphors. Should a dog run on to the field of play, and become embroiled in a scrum, the man at the microphone would be perfectly .iusti fled in making what he could of tin incident. But the novelist, unless, o i course, he be writing in the manner of Mr Steele Rudd, would ignore the dog, and devote at least ten lines to the appearance of the goal posts as they stood out stark and black against the westering rays of the sun, as it subsided, like a sucked orange beneath the enpurpled hills. Should he employ this forceful trope to indicate the setting sun he will refrain from mentioning the refreshment taken by the opposing teams at halftime. ~ „ . Here are a few hints to the novelist who would embody a football match in a tale. No novel that attempts to depict the social life of this country would be complete without a chapter devoted to the national game. The present writer has already written his, but, strange to say. the British publisher has not yet been found to recognise how scrupulously he has avoided the journalistic method. C. R. ALLEN.