IRIS EDITION
Shown here with the entire set

The Art of Golf was first published in 1887 by the Edinburgh publishing house of David Douglas. The Classics of golf edition has a Foreword by Herbert Warren Wind and an Afterword by Bobby Burnet, the learned and distinguished, retired historian of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. It is a very famous book in the history of the game, it is a great book and there are many reasons it has been thoroughly enjoyed for so many years. It was the first book to use photographs of golfers in action to illustrate the swing and the execution of different shots. They are magically evocative of the reality of golf one hundred years ago and, often accurate, like the technique for the soft "flop" shot on pages 152 and 153. Many poses are humorous, depicting the golfer in unfamiliar contortions - but there is one constant repeated in picture after picture - that is a full turn of the left shoulder. It is still the essence of the golf swing. The Art of Golf is surprisingly relevant when it comes to the psychology of the golfer, his whims, his tendency to self-destruction, his love of style and experimentation. Simpson's work is highly-polished with an allusive writing style and an astute sense of humor. "Golf refuses to be preserved like dead meat in tins. It is living, human, and free, ready to fly away at the least sign of an attempt to catch and cage it."

Simpson was a low middle-handicap golfer (he would have characterized himself as a high low-handicap golfer, for he played, as his caddie once pejoratively observed, a "proud game"). He took up golf at thirty on his doctor's advice and excelled at it. He understood the world of the middle-handicapper, which is a world with its own heaven and its own hell. The scratch golfer who has reached his late twenties or early thirties cannot really hope to get better. In fact, his life is devoted to a rear-guard and somewhat depressing strategy of not getting worse. The middle-handicapper may never achieve greatness, but he always has hope, even as he advances into his fifties and sixties, that some new technique, trick or attitude will improve his game. It is to this person, who lives partially in a world of chimeras and mirrors that Sir Walter is really speaking.

The Art of Golf is not without a cogent, overall philosophy. Perhaps its most famous injunction is: "There is, I repeat, a categorical imperative in golf - `Hit the Ball': but there are no minor absolutes." What exactly does this canny Scot, Sir Walter, mean by this? "It is only when each shot is treated as a separate act, in no way guaranteed by previous good ones: when each time he addresses the ball his chief care is to hit it . . . when, during the swing there is no consciousness of how he is swinging - that there will be an almost continuous record of palpable hits…As soon as any point of style is allowed, during the shot, to occupy the mind more than hitting the ball, a miss, more or less complete, will result." We are thinking creatures, with imagination and apprehension and yet, in golf, we are enjoined to give up our "godlike reason" and concentrate like an instinctual beast of prey on the task before us - not so easy.

Golf is not only portrayed by Simpson as a way of life, much like eating and sleeping. This is a typically Scottish attitude about the game, but is something very serious because it is so enjoyable. He and his friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, took a canal trip in France, which Stevenson wrote up as "An Inland Voyage". They met on their travels a group of young men who belonged to a nautical boat club, and Stevenson reflected on their enthusiasm: "They still knew that the interest they took in their business was a trifling affair compared to their spontaneous, long-suffering affection for nautical sports. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you, you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive." That was Simpson's attitude about golf.

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