POETS Day! GK Chesterton Was a Merry Old Soul

Photo by Adam Jones – Interior of Old King Cole Bar – St. Regis Hotel – Midtown – Manhattan – New York City – USA

Andrew J. Offutt was a science fiction and fantasy writer, respected in his field, very prolific, and who served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1976 – 1978. He also wrote more than four hundred erotic novels under the names Farrah Fawkes, Opal Andrews, Turk Winter, and fourteen pseudonyms.

Some years ago I read, “My Dad the Pornographer,” an article his son, Chris Offutt, wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. It’s behind a paywall now but the gist of the article is that the author’s dad died and left him a house full of binders filled pre-written sex acts. Apparently, Andrew Offutt would jot down any mechanics that came to him and when he needed to move a plot along (I know, but…) he’d reach for a readymade lewdness.

If I remember correctly, Chris wrote that his dad crossed out the ones he used with magic marker so they wouldn’t make a second appearance. Can’t have Farrah plagiarizing Turk. In some cases, there were sections of paper gone where naughty bits were literally cut out to be pasted into a working manuscript.

Andrew turned his down-low side hustle into an assembly line. If a scene occurred to him, he wrote it and found a use for it later. I think that’s brilliant and wish I’d been doing the same with POETS Day opening commentary so when I’m done with the main part about the week’s poet or poem I could reach for a binder filled with the joys of skipping away from the office or worksite for mid-afternoon weekend-style tomfoolery and presto, done. But I haven’t and I’m pressed for time.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, get out of work and all that.

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I saw P.J. O’Rourke (who, according to Perrin, deserves much of the credit for the Encyclopedia actually getting finished) do a reading a long time ago, and in a Q&A afterwards he was asked about working with O’Donoghue at National Lampoon. After giving the look that artists are required to give when they’re asked about other artists, he said something along the lines of: O’Donoghue had brilliant premises but would tire quickly of them. Hearing that has absolutely colored my interpretation of O’Donoghue’s work, but I think it sounds pretty accurate: O’Donoghue’s most incisive and shocking and cruel and funny stuff comes in quickly, destroys everything, and leaves before anyone knows what happened. There is a trajectory in these three books from the one-joke premise stretched past a reasonable place to just one million jokes, hitting hard and getting out before you have time to scrutinize them.
– Patrick Mortensen, “The Three Michael O’Donoghue Books You Should Read Before You Die,” Vulture

It’s said the Michael O’Donoghue joined up with National Lampoon Radio Hour on the condition that he’d get to say “Whoop, whoop! It’s Wobbles the Goose!” on the radio. I’d love to see that contract. According to Lampoon’s bankroller, Matty Simons, Wobbles the Duck was O’Donoghue’s nickname for Janis Hirsch, an accountant with Lampoon who was hit by polio a few years before the vaccine. It was about O’Rourke that Simmons wrote “He still exists on the Lampoon code, ‘You can say anything as long as it’s funny,’” but that applied to O’Donoghue too. Wrote Simmons, Hirsch “laughed at such humor, more than holding her own in this world of put-down,” and I believe him.

I’m not sure if Duck came first, but Goose made it to the radio. The joke is the concept. He wanted to waste three seconds of airtime saying something inane. That’s funny, but you don’t have to actually hear him say it on the air to giggle. Quick, funny, and done. His Ed Sullivan impersonation, “What if Ed Sullivan Were Tortured?” is similar.

O’Donoghue was capable of longer works, but two of his most famous, as mentioned in the linked Vulture article, were The Incredible Thrilling Adventures of The Rock and its opposite, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. The former was about a rock remaining inanimate for page after page and the latter about a woman repeatedly put in cliff-hanger situations by absurd (from Mortensen’s article “I counted fifty characters before I decided not to count anymore, some of which are: a sadistic ex-Nazi; Naguchi Koto, the Zen archer; death cultists; Eskimo medicine men; gay white slavers; an Afroasiatic foot fetishist; a crazed tattoo artist; a dead ringer for Norman Mailer; an eastern New Zealand lesbian gang – all of whom, for unexplained reasons, have it in for Phoebe.”) antagonists. Both are shaggy dog stories. The payoff isn’t in the ending but in extending the joke.

His “Pornocopia: Some Selections from the Supreme Court’s Summer Reading List” is a national treasure. It was his first article for National Lampoon, appearing April, 1970, in the premier edition. Earlier this week I found the issue on Internet Archive. It looks like they have it all: every issue, the yearbook, everything. Here’s the link. NSFW as you’d expect, and it should have a further warning about what a time sink you’re venturing into. (If I may be of service: “Vacation 58,” John Hughes’s story that would eventually become the movie Vacation isn’t in the August 1979 vacation themed issue but in the September issue of the same year.)

“Pornocopia” has a simple premise: riff on racy books by exaggerating the style of the authors. Each author or movement gets a few hundred-word sample so if O’Rourke is right and O’Donoghue gets bored quickly, the piece is set up as a series of quick hits. It’s perfect for him. He starts with John Cleland of Fanny Hill fame (“far from disrelishing”), and goes on to the Marquis de Sade, The Lost Generation, and others. I’ve loved the article since I first read it as a high-school senior in ’90 and it was the first thing I thought of when I read G.K. Chesterton’s parody, “Variations on an Air.”

I tried to find a word other than parody, a goofy word, for a collection of spoofs in the style of various authors but came back with nothing that grabbed me. “Malappropriations?” Chesterton’s has a different flavor. Where O’Donoghue exaggerates an author’s idiosyncrasies it’s within the limits of the genre in which the author published, Chesterton chooses a work and takes off, writing a caricature of what it would have looked like if a third party with a distinctively famous style had written it instead. They’re not the same, but cousins. There should be a goofy word.

Chesterton got roped into a production of Old King Cole and it roused his muse. He rolled the old rhyme about the king around and played with it. C.S. Lewis warns against assuming an author’s attitude when writing. Critics called part of something he wrote a “throwaway” when that part was the inspiration for the whole. A critic remarked on a “labored” section he wrote with ease, another an “indulgence” he wrote grudgingly, and so on. Pace Lewis, I say Chesterton had a blast writing these.

That’s not to say that they were easy to compose. Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, writes in “Lecture 51: The Collected Poems – Political Poems Written by a Patriot,”

“There are some non-political poems in this collection. The most literary ones are actually parodies of other poets. It is in playing with poetic forms that Chesterton displays his mastery of them. His “Variations on an Air” is a hilarious tour de force…”

Funny is hard to do. I won’t say any more. Enjoy.

Variations on an Air
Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe,
He called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.

After Lord Tennyson

Cole, That unwearied prince of Colchester,
Growing more gay with age and with long days
Deeper in laughter and desire of life,
As that Virginian climber on our walls
Flames scarlet with the fading of the year;
Called for his wassail and that other weed
Virginian also, from western woods
Where English Raleigh checked the boast of Spain,
And lighting joy with joy, and piling up
Pleasure as crown for pleasure, bade men bring
Those three, the minstrels whose emblazoned coats
Shone with the oyster-shells of Colchester;
And these three played, and playing grew more fain
Of mirth and music; till the heathen came,
And the King slept beside the northern sea.

 

After W.B. Yeats

Of an old King in a story
From the grey sea-folk I have heard,
Whose heart was no more broken
Than the wings of a bird.

As soon as the moon was silver
And the thin stars began,
He took his pipe and his tankard,
Like an old peasant man.

And three tall shadows were with him
And came at his command;
And played before him for ever
The fiddles of fairyland.

And he died in the young summer
Of the world’s desire;
Before our hearts were broken
Like sticks in a fire.

 

After Robert Browning

Who smoke-snorts toasts o’ My Lady Nicotine,
Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio
Stick up their Stradivarii (that’s the plural)
Or near enough, my fatheads; nimium
Vicina Cremone (that’s a bit too near.)
Is there some stockfish fails to understand?
Catch hold o’ the notion, bellow and blurt back ‘Cole?
Must I bawl lessons from a horn-book, howl,
Cat-call the cat-gut ‘fiddles’? Fiddlesticks!

 

After Walt Whitman

Me clairvoyant,
Me conscious of you, old camarado,
Needing no telescope, lorgnette, field-glass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez,
Me piercing two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed;
The crown cannot hide you from me;
Musty old feudal-heraldic trappings cannot hide you from me,
I perceive that you drink.
(I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)
I see you are inhaling tobacco, puffing, smoking, spitting
(I do not object to your spitting),
You prophetic of American largeness,
You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States;
I see in you also there are movements, tremors, tears, desire for the melodious,
I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations,
Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever;
They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment;
I myself am a complete orchestra.
So long.

 

After Swinburne

In the time of old sin without sadness
And golden with wastage of gold,
Like the gods that grow old in their gladness
Was the king that was glad, growing old;
And with sound of loud lyres from his palace
The voice of his oracles spoke,
And the lips that were red from his chalice
Were splendid with smoke.

When the weed was as flame for a token
And the wine was as blood for a sign;
And upheld in his hands and unbroken
The fountains of fire and of wine.
And a song without speech, without singer,
Stung the soul of a thousand in three
As the flesh of the earth has to sting her,
The soul of the sea.