Review : ‘Tell Them I’ve Had A Wonderful Life’ - Turning Over The Pebbles By Mike Brearley

I have a confession: I’m a bit rubbish at sport. All thumbs at cricket, two left feet at football, although I now appreciate both games, particularly the England cricket team and Manchester United. Mike Brearley is a very different kettle of fish. When he was a sports-mad boy his mother, already reading the mud trodden into the carpet, cut across one forensic post-match analysis: “If you carry on like this, you’ll do nothing but play football and cricket all your life.”

In fact, he did not become an exclusive homo ludens, but is blessed with an open, playful approach to life in general. The blessings didn’t stop there: he also has a first-class mind, stable temperament, capacity for hard work, and a sharp eye for the chances sent by serendipity.

He studied Classics and Philosophy at Cambridge, initially lecturing at the University of California at Irvine and Newcastle University. He also toyed with a Civil Service career, placing joint top in the entrance exam, as well as politely declining an offer to join MI6 (the requisite deceit was a turn-off).

From early on at Cambridge and onwards, he played cricket at county and international levels, only going professional at the end of his twenties, in 1971. He would captain England in 1977-80, leading them to seventeen wins and four losses, memorably being recalled in 1981 to lead the side to its historic home Ashes win over Australia.

Of course, Brearley is far more than only a successful sportsman. As his cricketing career drew to a close, he began to seriously pursue his next path - which in certain quarters has brought as much if not even more acclaim - as a psychoanalyst.

It was famously said of Brearley during his captaincy that he had a PhD in people. I can thoroughly recommend his earlier work, a distillation of leadership insights from that period, The Art of Captaincy. I first heard about it twenty years ago when teaching in London and have read it repeatedly: the model of an open-minded leader with a confident sense of self is one that I treasure.

That impression continues here in this singular memoir that eschews the traditional model of linear life narrative, boldly going where few memoirists have gone before along a meandering route, free associating about life, experiences, literature, figures in philosophy and psychoanalysis (especially Wittgenstein and Wilfred Bion), all the while identifying the meaningful threads in the warp and weft, drawing them together into a pleasing weave.

The reader is privy to an intelligent, educated, experienced man taking stock with admirable clarity and honesty, allowing us to eavesdrop on his self-reflection and musings. Is a full life lived in the body or the mind? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brearley reaches the conclusion that the best integrates both. He also mulls over to what extent his particular path of integration has been the right one. Along the way, we sit with him as he turns over these pebbles, considering their shape, colour, texture, arranging them in certain patterns. Just don’t expect to be presented with every pebble of his life neatly laid out in a single row.

We listen in at various points to Brearley’s thoughts on religion. Being a spiritual, open-minded atheist, he appreciates the many benefits of religion whilst not being personally persuaded of an afterlife or any divine ‘ultimate reality’. He wanders from Jesus to Billy Graham to Ezekiel, also introducing the analyst Donald Winnicott and his views of transitional objects. It comes as little surprise that Brearley knows and respects Rowan Williams, a previously (famously erudite and open-minded) Archbishop of Canterbury.

We are treated to tasty aperitifs of both Wittgenstein and Bion, and appetising entrees into their work. We hear of Brearley’s admiration for Wittgenstein’s unsparing, iconoclastic thinking, and above all his fearless drive to go his own way. Still, the watchful and the playful converge for Brearley; he artfully stitches together a memory of the aptly named Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom, visiting Brearley at UC Irvine, delightedly admiring kites in the sky: “Look how high they are!”, and echoing Wittgenstein’s “capacity for awe and reverence”. ‘“Don’t think, look,” [Wittgenstein] wrote’…’Looking, really looking and really seeing connections, is like hearing music.” But the path of wisdom and insight is not all one kind, easy gradient. Brearley applauds the unremitting quest for deep understanding in Wittgenstein: ‘What is the use of studying philosophy if it doesn’t improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?’

We then proceed down another fascinating avenue, where Brearley fondly recollects his first reading of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, recommended by a university contemporary. As with so much else here, we soon move beyond easy appreciation, with Brearley considering the telling tensions between involvement and observation within James himself. It is highly probable that James wrestled with homoerotic urges for the whole of his life. His resolution of those urges was to become the eternal watcher, sublimating and reconciling his own and others’ challenged psychologies within the labyrinthine introspection of his (in)famously lapidary prose.

This is followed by a revisitation of Brearley’s appearance on Radio 3’s Private Passions, exploring his choices of classical music, including a perhaps surprising selection of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, then onto a fascinating chapter on Bion, a seminal influence on Brearley personally and professionally. A World War One Tank officer, Bion won the DSO, laconically remarking: “I think I might with equal relevance have been recommended for a court martial. It all depended on the direction which one took when one ran away.” This could probably apply to everyone, in one way or another.

So where, you might ask, is the cricket? Sprinkled all the way through, generally illustrating truths about Brearley as player and man. Like everything else, the cricket is a thread rather than the whole weave.

The book concludes with Brearley confronting his own mortality. Having survived two brushes with cancer, at eighty he is a relatively healthy and certainly happy man, tempering his pleasure in life with the inevitable knowledge that each annual landmark may be rolling around for the last time.

He invokes Eliot when considering the necessarily compromised yet effective nature of one who attempts to heal out of their own injury: ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel/ That questions the distempered part./ Beneath the bleeding hands we feel/ The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.’

Can life ever be perfect? Of course not: that isn’t the point of life, but that shouldn’t stop us learning from and enjoying the ride. Towards the end of this hugely enjoyable book, we have a pithy anecdote on Wittgenstein: ‘Shortly before he died, [he] said, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” He also said that fear of death is a sign of a life not well lived.’

I would argue that in his enthusiastic embracing of the eclectic experiences that life sends his way and his honest, kind attempts to learn from them, Mike Brearley has lived his life well. He now spends two months of every year in India, his wife’s birthplace, and this book is one of several that have emerged from this semi-retirement work-life balance reset. I wish him well in his sojourning, and hope that there will be more pebbles turned over before the end.