Vulnerable in Hearts Page 8
I pick through the miscellany of our card drawer, remembering some, discovering others. Some packs are unopened. Others are worn from use almost to destruction. Recently, I was given one of the pack of cards used in a recent world championship. Nowadays, tournament cards have a regimental purity about them. They are strictly symmetrical about both axes. The colours are slightly differentiated – the diamonds are a different red from the hearts, and the spades and clubs are shades of grey and black. They have bar codes to enable the dealing machines to duplicate the hands. Every pack looks exactly the same. There is no story. But these cards in the drawer of our home in South Africa are different. I learned to play bridge with them.
11. People not cards
I REALISE NOW that bridge became a form of expression for Dad, a kind of storytelling where the story is on ‘a loop’ and repeats itself ad infinitum. As we learn to play, it becomes a favoured metaphor of his. It’s how he talks about people. It’s how he tells us about himself.
In his version of this story – in his version of any story – he is declarer. He made the contract and he will play the hand. He is the focus of attention, the centre of his small universe and far more important than his left-hand and right-hand opponents or ‘East and West’. In our family, my mother and sister are East and West. In this scheme of things, declarer always sits South and declarer’s partner therefore is North. Declarer’s partner, the one who ‘makes the fourth’, is known as dummy. In French they call it le Mort, the dead, which is unkind both to dummy and to the dead. The fifth role belongs to the kibitzers, those who merely watch.
‘Kibitzer’ comes to us via Yiddish and German, from Kiebitz, the name of a type of plover with a folk reputation as a meddler, sticking its beak in where it doesn’t belong. Expert kibitzers know that there are few pleasures in bridge greater than critiquing the efforts of those at play without having a financial or emotional interest in the outcome of the game. There are rules, written and unwritten, that govern the behaviour of kibitzers. Law 11 of the ‘Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge’, for example, requires that a spectator should not look at the hand of more than one player, except by permission; shall not display any reaction to the bidding or while a deal is in progress; and shall always and everywhere refrain from conversation with a player during play. A stony and possibly reverential silence is required for the whole of the play. Once the hand is over, the kibitzer may, should he wish, guffaw loudly and make disparaging remarks about the parentage of the players, but he should bear in mind that the players have the right – in tournament play anyway – to have any kibitzer ejected from the room. And – which is most frustrating – kibitzers ‘shall not call attention to or comment on any irregularity unless asked to do so by the tournament director’.
This is just as well. In my experience, kibitzers in their omniscience have an oppressive regard for the ‘best possible contract’. In Why You Lose at Bridge, S.J. Simon makes the distinction between the ‘best possible result’ and the ‘best result possible’. The latter, he argues, is more desirable because it takes into account not only your cards but also the people at the table. ‘The professional is not concerned with playing good bridge. He is playing practical bridge. He is not interested in the best theoretical result on the hand – all he cares about is what he can score in the actual circumstances. It is no use to him that a small slam can be made on a squeeze if his partner, who has to play the hand, can’t execute a squeeze.’ Both he and Ely Culbertson famously argued that they ‘play people not cards’. Easley Blackwood, who invented the game’s most widely known bidding convention in the game, called his bridge book Bridge Humanics: How to Play People as Well as the Cards. There is much more to take into account than how the cards lie.
Kibitzers are too concerned with the ‘best possible result’. There is something slightly unforgiving about them. Victor Mollo put it neatly. Who would wish to be, he asked, the sort of person who brings ‘to the bridge table that gift for lightning analysis which enables him to tell at once why a patient had departed and how his life could have been saved’?
David is not much of a kibitzer. He prefers to do things than to watch. I am more of a watcher, but I am frustrated that, as my elder brother, he knows more than me. At the bridge table, this is no longer true. I know more than him. I like this.
Then there is dummy, which was my role as often as not when I played with Dad. It was where I viewed him from, tugging at his dark, bushy eyebrows, muttering to himself, humming a snatch of some work, Beethoven perhaps, and planning a coup of such devilish complexity that he would, in all likelihood, fool himself as well as his opponents. My being dummy was nothing personal; it was only that he loved to declare. He was a natural ‘hog’ and believed implicitly that ‘it was in my interest as well as his to let him play the hand.’
‘Hogs’, those who want to play the hand no matter what the cost, are a well-known phenomenon in bridge clubs. The most famous ‘hog’ of them all is an invention of Victor Mollo who wrote several books starring ‘the Hideous Hog’. ‘H.H.’ as he is known is one of several characters that populate the Griffins Club in central London. Over the years, Mollo came to realise that all the club players had their equivalents in the animal world, and the club, in his writings, becomes a menagerie in which the various animals behave true to their natures and to their cards. Mollo’s series of books on Bridge in the Menagerie (later co-written with others) remain some of the best books on bridge. Of all of the characters it is ‘H.H.’ who demands the limelight, both for his brilliance and his insufferable arrogance. Dad would without doubt have agreed with Mollo that ‘The word ‘hog’ ... should be an honoured title, not a term of opprobrium. On grounds of expediency it is obvious that the better player should be in charge, for the strong have a moral obligation to look after the weak, and who can be weaker than a weak partner, who can be more deserving of protection not only from others, but above all from himself?’
In fact, Mollo goes on neatly to subvert the Hog’s view. ‘The fallacy of the Hog’s approach,’ he writes, ‘lay in assuming that the interests of partners are one and indivisible, that what is good for North is equally good for South and vice versa. That is at best a half-truth. Neither North nor South wants to lose, but winning may be all-important to South and of comparatively little importance to North. Leaving all moral considerations aside (and where else is one to put them?) it is indisputably in everyone’s interest to play as many hands as possible.’
Ranged against declarer are the opponents, who may or may not include one’s partner, whom Zia Mahmood has, with some justification, described as ‘centre-hand opponent’. In Mahmood’s world, ‘centre-hand opponent’ is the kind of partner who will make a doomed sacrifice bid of 5 instead of leaving one’s vulnerable opponents in a redoubled contract of 4 in which they are certain to go at least three down (i.e. make only seven tricks instead of the ten they have agreed in the contract). In one particular hand that Mahmood describes, he does give credit where credit is due. ‘My partner played the hand well, contriving an endplay against East which allowed him to escape for eight down ...’ The joke in bridge is that a partner is someone who sticks with you through the trouble you wouldn’t be in without him. Bridge is full of anecdotes like the one about George Kaufman, who, in between writing Broadway successes, made himself into a top-class bridge player, and who one afternoon found himself playing with a woman of limited ability who duly proceeded to massacre a cast-iron contract. ‘Madame,’ he is reported to have enquired, ‘when did you take up this game? Oh, I know it was today, but what time today?’
But you have to have a partner and it is as well to know with whom you are playing. S.J. Simon puts it like this: ‘You must learn to play your players. And your partners more than your opponents. You must learn their strengths, weaknesses, predilections and obstinacies – and allow for them.’ Zia Mahmood told me once in conversation of another great club player: ‘This guy, frankly, he’s an embarrassment. I mean, you woul
dn’t ever want him to come to your house. You know, he’s not the sort of person you want to introduce to your mother. His clothes, his smell, I mean. But ...’
But you would want him on your side. But you would rather be with him than against him. But, despite his looks and his disastrous personal hygiene, despite his debts, his alcoholism and his chain-smoking, despite his philandering and lies, despite everything, you know that in the end you can trust him because he plays good bridge and must therefore somehow represent all that is good and wholesome, progressive, honest and orderly.
And he wants to win, even more than you do.
As long as I was prepared to be dummy, I could escape being labelled a centre-hand opponent. In this sense, my relationship with my father was always sympathetic, and from a very early age I understood that the essence of playing with him was to share his brilliance, especially when it failed. It was better if it succeeded, of course, but there was no dishonour in losing. Icarus may have fallen from the sky, but he did it with style. Not for Dad the ignominious ‘white legs disappearing into the green / Water’ of W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts. To see Icarus as merely a ‘boy falling out of the sky’ was simply to have come to the story at the wrong moment. To have caught him in the ascendancy, with the wax still holding, was to see it in another way entirely. At that moment, anything is possible, just as a hopeless contract is possible up until, though not including, the moment the unfortunate 8–1 trump split is revealed.
‘And even then ...’ Dad would have said, and one would have been expected to share with him the hopeless optimism that believes in the miracles of which he alone (or so he thought) was capable. In bridge, one’s opponents have no interest in sharing anything. They are not impressed with your flair and precision. They lump all these attributes under the heading of ‘arrogance’ or ‘idiocy’ or possibly both, and either way they accord you only contempt or loathing, the latter being a form of grudging respect. They are there to frustrate you or, even better, to be humiliated and frustrated by you.
Officially, dummy’s role is to sit silently while your partner makes an unholy mess of things or – more rarely – inadvertently rescues you from a truly awful contract. Like kibitzers, dummy is, by the Laws of Contract Bridge, forbidden from any number of activities. These laws are enforced with increasing severity the higher one goes up the bridge ladder. At home, the rules may be bent this way and that, but, in tournament play, this will not happen. But dummy is not forbidden everything. He may, for example, draw attention to irregularities in the play (which kibitzers may not) once all fifty-two cards have been played, though not before. In some countries, notably the United States, he may prevent a revoke (when a player does not follow suit, despite having available cards of the suit that was led) by asking his partner whether he has any cards of that suit. Laws 42 and 43 go into dummy’s rights in some detail. He forfeits these rights if at any stage of the play he looks at his partner’s or opponents’ cards. But these are the laws as they apply to tournament play and sometimes to high-stakes rubber bridge. In more social forms of the game, we have a greater licence.
The name ‘dummy’ comes from an earlier version of whist, in which there were only three players and the fourth hand was open on the table for all to see, there being a kind of imaginary and silent player. In contract bridge, however, despite the rules and the nomenclature, the best dummies are highly active. They make the tea, refill glasses, summon more canapés from a passing waiter (signing the bill while they’re at it) and bring updates on the progress of the cricket or the 3.15 from Turffontein. They live each twist and turn of the play. And they remember the play best, if only for the purpose of later berating their partner. They may not have the analytical skills or knowledge of the kibitzer, nor may they remember who held what cards precisely, or in what order they were played, but they have the correct emotional register with which to celebrate success or apportion blame. And sometimes dummy can help the play, with a helpful nudge here or a neat piece of misdirection there. On the rare occasions when he allows his partner to play a hand, for example, the Hideous Hog is an animated and dangerous dummy. ‘A remarkable facet of the Hog’s self-confessed genius was his ability to control the play as dummy,’ says Mollo. The Hog does this through a combination of dishonesty and gloating, usually at his partner’s expense but undoubtedly also in his interest. And the interests of better bridge, of course. He distracts the opponents, lays false trails, talks loudly over the play, eats and drinks anything within range, scratches himself noisily and is merciless in his dissection of his opponents’ many faults when his partner has, through some gross gaffe, made the contract.
Such an elaborate metaphor. I wonder where it all began.
PART III
WHEN HIS WORLD WAS YOUNG
12. An evening in Panama
CONTRACT BRIDGE – the history of which is little known prior to 1925 – began on 1 November of that year. In his history of the game, The Walk of the Oysters, Rex Mackey called it ‘the time of the great hangover’ in Europe. Nothing seemed certain. ‘Despite the affable gentlemen who signed the Locarno Treaties “forever preserving their nations from the scourge of war,” everywhere there was unemployment, crises and gloom, gloom, gloom.’ Britain was under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, now in his second stint as Prime Minister, having previously been deposed by the attentions of David Lloyd George. Unlike our current leaders for whom it is necessary always to appear busy and for whom to relax is to risk vilification, Baldwin was content to while away long afternoons at 10 Downing Street playing auction bridge with ladies of reportedly dubious morals.
In the United States, however, the mood was more optimistic. Coolidge presided over his exuberant nation with the disinterest of the wealthy patriarch, his mind on other deals, while – despite the 18th Amendment – his people sported themselves in the clubs, theatres and arenas of the country’s thrusting new cities. Again, Mackey puts it neatly. ‘While the Rum Fleet lay offshore, New York became a vast speakeasy and the civic affairs of Chicago were guided by the competent hands of Alphonse Capone; in the deep South the Dayton Monkey Trial put the Bible in the ring against the Origin of the Species; and on a November night in his stateroom on the S.S. Finland, Harold Sterling Vanderbilt shuffled a deck of cards.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald also published The Great Gatsby in 1925, John Logie Baird demonstrated that television was more than just a dream, and in South Africa a modest Dutch dialect, having acquired an army, became the language of Afrikaans.
But, for the time being, the United States appeared to be a nation at play, and Vanderbilt was one of its greatest players. A yachtsman of international stature, a natural athlete and one of the finest card players of his generation, his was a roving and inquisitive mind, always willing to experiment and explore. So it was that, while on that cruise ship and passing through the Panama Canal in the fall of 1925, he shuffled the pack of cards and looked around at the three men who accompanied him.
‘Gentleman,’ he said to his assembled companions, ‘let me show you a new game. It may interest you.’
Indeed. It interested them and generations to come with a passion bordering on the ridiculous. Even so level-headed an individual as the late Lord Lever could remark, ‘Chess is challenging but bridge is the stuff of life.’ Rex Mackey put it like this: ‘Housewives, who hitherto thought dummy was a baby’s pacifier, banded themselves together to the permanent ruin of their husband’s digestions. It interested newspaper and publishers, films and radio, big business and ballyhoo merchants. It added a new dimension to leisure, and it also provoked murder, mayhem and domestic strife ...’
The newly leisured classes, temporarily free from the scourge of war, needed something to do in the evenings. Something that didn’t cost money and didn’t require them to ‘go out’. Something which you could do whether you were eight or eighty. Something which allowed for conversation, but which filled the silences. Something accessible yet challenging.
Something that ever
yone would like, whether or not they knew it yet.
Vanderbilt, for whom bridge was only one of many things to occupy his mind, recalled how he came to devise the rules: ‘Many years of experience playing games of the Whist family were,’ he wrote, ‘a necessary prelude to acquiring the background and knowledge needed to evolve the game of Contract Bridge ... I compiled in the autumn of 1925 a scoring table for my new game. I called it Contract Bridge and incorporated in it, not only the best features of Auction and Plafond, but also a number of new and exciting features; premiums for slams bid and made, vulnerability, and the decimal system of scoring which by increasing both trick and game values and all premiums and penalties was destined to add enormously to the popularity of Contract Bridge.’
Many have written that Vanderbilt invented ‘contract bridge’ but this appears not to have been the case. The name had already been used in other contexts – W. Somerset Maugham, a fanatical player, mentioned a game called ‘contract’ in Ashenden, his semi-fictional account of spying for Britain (amongst which exploits he numbers attempting, but failing, to prevent the successful uprisings in what was then known as St Petersburg) – and others had suggested variations on auction bridge at various times over the preceding decade. Maugham first refers to bridge in Smith, the ‘first play in the history of theatre to open with a game of bridge’. That was in 1909. At other times, he took the view that ‘bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the art of man has so far devised’. In his short story Christmas Holiday, he wrote these lovely, if hyperbolic, lines: