Tennis in Literature

Wimbledon-watchers can look forward to 101-decibel grunts, serves launched at over 100 mph and nail-biting tension as world-class professional players battle it out for the trophy. But there’s another side to this most English of sports, as an arena for flirtation, sartorial showing off, social climbing and the battle of the sexes. 
Tennis has a remarkably ancient history. It evolved from a version of hand-ball played by the Ancient Greeks and Romans; by the Middle Ages, the leather glove they wore for protection had become a racket. The name itself is thought to come from the Anglo-Norman ‘Tenetz!’ meaning ‘Take this! Play!’, and it wasn’t long before royalty got in on the act, securing the game its famous moniker ‘the sport of kings’. A tennis court was built at Hampton Court Palace in 1529 for Cardinal Wolsey and as a young man, Henry VIII was a passionate and talented tennis player.
Later, much later, tennis became associated with the ‘fast’ lifestyle of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. ‘Mixed doubles’ conjured up images of daring flapper girls in androgynous clothing and the possibility that changing ends might usher in all sorts of swapping opportunities. 
So it’s hardly surprising that tennis has popped up in diary entries and numerous works of fiction as the perfect metaphor for a variety of human activities – not to mention arousing some very human reactions to fudged serves and dropped balls (Pepys, in a diary entry of April 4th, 1668, writes, ‘…how my Lord of Pembroke says he hath heard the Quaker at the tennis-court swear to himself when he loses’).
Here, then, is Culture Whisper’s top ten fictional tennis matches and moments:
1. The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster
The murderous Bosola, Webster’s complex anti-hero, prefaces the news that the Duchess is dead with some tennis-based philosophy:
‘We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and bandied/ Which way please them’
2. Henry V, Shakespeare
On hearing that the French Dauphin has sent him a mocking present of tennis-balls, Henry replies magnificently,
‘We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have march'd our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.’
3. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg
Hogg’s angelic brother George, later to be an innocent victim, is accosted by his devilish sibling Robert, the justified sinner of the title, at a tennis match, an encounter which is a mere foretaste of things to come:
‘The very next time that George was engaged at tennis, he had not struck the ball above twice till the same intrusive being was again in his way. The party played for considerable stakes that day, namely, a dinner and wine at the Black Bull tavern; and George, as the hero and head of his party, was much interested in its honour; consequently the sight of this moody and hellish-looking student affected him in no very pleasant manner. “Pray Sir, be so good as keep without the range of the ball,” said he.
“Is there any law or enactment that can compel me to do so?” said the other, biting his lip with scorn.
“If there is not, they are here that shall compel you,” returned George. “So, friend, I rede you to be on your guard.”’
4. Up from the Depths, PG Wodehouse
The narrator advises keen golfer Ambrose Gussett that tennis player Evangeline Tewkesbury can never make him happy. ‘”It is essential that he has a sympathetic listener always handy, to whom he can relate the details of the day’s play. What sort of a life companion would a tennis player be?”
He sighed ecstatically. 
“Just let me get this tennis player as a life companion, and you won’t find me beefing. I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her,” said Ambrose Gussett, summing up.’
5. The Hedgehog, Saki
For the masterly short story writer and satirist of Edwardian society Saki, tennis is simultaneously social and sporting: 
‘A “Mixed Double” of young people were contesting a game of lawn tennis at the Rectory garden party; for the past five-and-twenty years at least mixed doubles of young people had done exactly the same thing on exactly the same spot at about the same time of year. The young people changed and made way for others in the course of time, but very little else seemed to alter. The present players were sufficiently conscious of the social nature of the occasion to be concerned about their clothes and appearance, and sufficiently sport-loving to be keen on the game. 
6. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Tennis is the sport of choice for Fitz’s bored, spoilt and amoral cast of bright young things, summed up by freeloader Klipspringer, who rings the house after Gatsby’s death to see if he’s left his tennis shoes behind, but refuses to come to his funeral:
'“What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My address is care of B. F. ——”
I didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver.'
7. A Subaltern’s Love Song, John Betjeman
There can be few more touching renditions of ordinary Home Counties love and lust than this irresistible poem:
‘Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.’
8. Money, Martin Amis
In his 1984 satire on consumerism and Eighties excess, Amis, himself a keen tennis player, humiliates his hero via tennis.
The match is between ad exec John Self, our fat, Cockney, stinking, capitalist anti-hero, and Fielding Goodney, a fabulous all-American film producer, at Goodney’s gleamingly expensive Manhattan sports club. Goodney, ‘tanned, tuned, a king’s ransom of orthodonture having passed through his mouth, reared on steaks and on milk sweetened with iron and zinc’ demolishes Self, ‘ten years older’, with his addictions and ‘yob genes, booze, snout and fast food, charred and choked on heavy fuel’.
9. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Like Amis, Wallace was himself a keen tennis player, and wrote about playing the game as a teenager in Illinois in ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again’. Infinite Jest, his gigantic, experimental, futuristic satire, features a junior tennis academy and a nearby substance abuse clinic. 
On developing tennis mastery:
‘…you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’
10. Double Fault, Lionel Shriver 
Before Shriver’s horribly prophetic We Need To Talk About Kevin came seven other novels. Double Fault tells the story of a marriage through the competing tennis careers of husband and wife Eric Oberdorf and Willy Novinsky. The novel, Shriver tells us, is “not so much about tennis as marriage, a slightly different sport”, but one of the book’s centrepieces is a seven-page description of a gripping match.