The Mystery of Golf - Arnold Haultain

[Brian Phillips]

This book has been recommended a number of times by Forrest Richardson.  Well, I finally managed to get a copy in a bookchain called Borders in Scotland.

It took me ages to find it.  I tried everywhere including Amazon.  When I typed in the title it never seem to come up but if you type in the ISBN it comes up straight away.

So here is the ISBN now that i have it, if anyone wants it from Amazon.co.uk

0285636162

Brian

[BCrosby]

It is a wonderful book. A blend of purple prose, irony and metaphysics.

For example:

"He who would attain self-knowledge should frequent the links."

"In no other game must immense strength go hand in hand with extreme delicacy."

"Is there some inscrutable medium between soul and soul, the existence of which only golf reveals?"

The only other golf writer (metaphysics division) in Haultain's league is John Updike. Who may actually be better.

Haultain's The Mystery of Golf is a must get.

Bob

[Kelly_Blake_Moran]

Brian,

A bookchan called Borders.  Never heard of it here.  Do you think it will catch on and possibly end up on every corner in American like McDonalds, or Fazios?

[Brian Phillips]

BCrosby,

It is funny you should mention John Updike as he writes the afterword in this publication.

Brian

[Norbert P]

 Just bringing this back up so that Tom Paul can acquire it and read it.  

[Yancey_Beamer]

Gentlemen,
Grant Books-Tel:01299 851 588
                  Fax:01299 851 446

A copy or two was available last week.
Yancey

[Bob_Huntley]

The difference between Arnaud and John was that the former was a player, the latter an abyssmal (golfing) hack.

[TEPaul]

"Just bringing this back up so that Tom Paul can acquire it and read it."

Slag:

I absolutely plan to get Arnold Haultain's book and read it very carefully. I'm particularly interested in some of Haultain's very early ideas on time and space in golf architecture. I believe Max Behr very likely picked up some of his ideas on this concept (and a few others) from Haultain before Behr went on to more fully develop those ideas in his extraordinary series of essays through the 1920s and beyond. I want to closely analyze the writing of the man Behr went far beyond and ended up leaving in his dust!

 

[Norbert P]

 Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Tom, it's time to pick up the Max Behr torch, previously carried by Arnold Haultain, and enlighten the world.  
(As you are)

[Forrest Richardson]

Among my favorite Haultain passages:

"The outsider does not know that at every hole is enacted every time a small but intensely interesting three-act drama. There is Act I, the drive...there is act II, the approach...there is act III, the putt...."

To be fair, Haultain elaborates. I only provide here the simple concept which he includes nearly 100 years ago.