POETS Day! A Bit of Light Verse

The school year is coming to a close and that means rough duty for POETS Day. The last couple weeks of students’ time is usually cordoned off for exam review and preparation, final essays, and such projects. That creates a bottleneck of extracurricular events now. Playoffs, tournaments, recitals, and plays need completion before testing. Such things require an audience and if you’re a parent or relative of a student in any end of term activity, you’re an expected attendee.

I’m joining the theater set for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a nephew in Legally Blonde tonight and then my son’s on stage for a three night run of Mamma Mia! I love this sort of thing even though they frown on leaving after your kid’s scenes are done (America, explain!), but I know others see these as slogs to suffer through. They’re a drain on weekend free time no matter which way you look at it, so do the right thing and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. A perfect day is the name of the game, and that starts with ducking out of work and indulging your wants and needs – after a little verse.

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“Light Verse obeys Coleridge’s definition of poetry, the best words in the best order; it demands Carlyle’s definition of genius, transcendent capacity for taking pains; and it’s the supreme exhibition of somebody’s definition of art, the concealment of art. In the result it observes the most exact laws of rhythm and metre as if by a happy accident, and in a sort of nonchalant spirit of mockery at the real poets who do it on purpose. But to describe it so leaves something unsaid; one must also say what it is not. Light Verse, then, is not the relaxation of a major poet in the intervals of writing an epic; it is not the kindly contribution of a minor poet to a little girls album; it is not Cowper amusing (and how easily) Lady Austin, nor Southey splashing about, to his own great content, in the waters of the Lodore. It is precise art which has only been taken seriously, and thus qualified as an art, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It needs neither genealogical backing nor distinguished patronage to make it respectable.”
– A.A. Milne, Year In, Year Out

I used to have several half-read science books on my shelves. No idea what happened to them. There’ve been moves and a marriage and things get lent out, but you could spot the half-read books from across the room because I used to be hell on spines. I’m fitfully getting better, but I’d leave them pinstriped with pulpy white creases. This series of science books covered a different discipline in each volume, each written by a luminary of the field. The format was the same no matter the academic star or subject: about one hundred and fifty pages of conversational scientific explanation geared towards the layman and then a second section that began with “This is the paper I submitted to the [Nobel Committee, Royal Society, etc.],” followed by another hundred plus pages of brief paragraphs interspaced with Greek alphabet math. You didn’t need to look at the contents to see where that second section began. The spine creases marked the break.

Now I have a handful of books that are the mirror image. This new breed boasts a pristine first half of a spine with the second half mistreated. Sometimes I’ll borrow a book from the library and within a few pages know I need my own copy. Amazon is pretty fast, so a bookmark moves from the loaner to my new purchase and it eventually looks weird on the shelf.

The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse is an anthology and I’m hopping from back to front to middle, so there are seven torn pieces of paper rather than one bookmark to migrate to the copy Amazon has listed as “Shipped,” so my new copy will show more even wear, but it’s the spiritual kin of the right side bent books. I’m having a great time with this book.

The A.A. Milne quote above is part of a longer passage quoted by Kingsley Amis in his editor’s introduction. Of the larger passage he writes, “It puts so many necessary points so exactly and elegantly that I must quote it at length.” If I had the space I would as well, but that paragraph gives the gist. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Amis’s promiscuous use of semicolons in his poetry and seeing so many in Milne’s writing warms my heart. I feel like the three of us would be best friends.

I remember watching The Spanish Prisoner with my mother and telling her how good I thought Steve Martin was in it. Comedic actors can surprise in dramatic roles and I don’t think I’d seen Martin in one before. He was Navin R. Johnson to me; a wild and crazy guy. Mom held that comedic timing is the hardest kind to master. If you could pull it off, you could do anything. She’d said that as far back as I can remember, before a Bosom Buddy got his first of three Oscars. I’d noted it before, but Martin sticks with me for some reason.

It’s not easy to be funny. I think everybody knows that, but comedians suffer from misfiring projection. Audiences attending a highbrow performance or reading a work of literature accorded status look at serious work, take it seriously, and want to believe diligence and consideration was seriously applied. They look at a comic work, don’t want to take it seriously, and marvel at the whimsy. Again from Amis, “A concert pianist is allowed a wrong note here and there; a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate.”

Thankfully, funny doesn’t have to be taken seriously; resists the notion that it should and trades mostly in appreciation. Donald O‘Connor lifts the veil on “the concealment of art” in a classic Singing in the Rain scene:

Or can study Shakespeare and be quite elite
And you could charm the critics and have nothing to eat
Just slip on a banana peel, the world’s at you feet
Make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh

Samuel Johnson is so well regarded as a man of letters that his Christian name is practically unnecessary. “Doctor” Johnson is sufficient, but so is Johnson in most cases when speaking about English literature. He’s exalted over fellow Englishmen who wrote before the wig powder market cratered. His wit had mass and, like Churchill and Will Rogers, that concentration of clever turns and bon mots began attracting attributions, free floating stories that might get ascribed to the man despite little evidence of having happened at all. Good stories though.

My favorite Dr. Johnson anecdote puts him at a London reception in honor of his recently published dictionary. A woman who would no doubt be Lady Astor were this a Churchill story, congratulates him on excluding definitions of vulgar terms in his work to which he responds something along the lines of “I hope I have, madam,” – the “madam” is a staple of the form – “but I see you have been looking for them.”

What’s an otherwise famous dead English poet named Jonson (I know, but hold on) to do when the Doctor hogs the name in such an un-Christian manner? Not only is Ben Jonson well known, he spells his name differently. But when people hear unspecified Jonson they think specified Johnson. Poor “h”-less Jonson was already second fiddle to Marlowe as second fiddle to Shakespeare’s position as playwright of the age. He didn’t need an upstart homonym one hundred and thirty seven years his junior eclipsing him, too. For a man of Jonson’s talent, that’s astronomical bad luck.

This is from the better named of the two, considered a master of stage comedy.

On Giles and Joan
Ben Jonson (1573-1637)

Who says that Giles and Joan at discord be?
The observing neighbors no such mood can see.
Indeed, poor Giles repents he married ever:
But that his Joan doth too. And Giles would never,
By his free will, be in Joan’s company;
No more would Joan he should. Giles riseth early,
And having got him out of doors is glad—
The like is Joan—but turning home, is sad;
And so is Joan. Oft-times, when Giles doth find
Harsh sights at home, Giles wisheth he were blind:
All this doth Joan. Or that his long-yarned life
Were quite out-spun; the like wish hath his wife.
The children that he keeps, Giles swears are none
Of his begetting; and so swears his Joan:
In all affections she concurreth still.
If now, with a man and wife, to will and nill
The self-same things a note of concord be,
I know no couple better can agree!

Lewis is a popular last name as well. I’m not sure how popular Wyndham was as a first name in the first half of the 20^th Century. You’d think you’d be safe if you wanted to make a splash in London literary circles back then as Wyndham Lewis without hearing “Hey. Aren’t you the guy that wrote a one hundred and twelve page book called Hitler about how great Hitler was?” That wasn’t the case for D.B. Wyndham Lewis because Percy Wyndham Lewis and his Hitler book had better exposure.

Worse still, Percy dropped the Percy and went by plain ole Wyndham Lewis. Under that name he’s remembered as the guy that Roy Campbell blasted for thinking he’d want to be a member of the British Union of Fascists and for the development of Vorticism, a short lived but influential artistic movement. He frequented a London night club called The Cave of the Golden Calf where a bunch of his art was on display. John Tytell writes, in Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano, by the summer of 1914, “At the Cave of the Golden Calf, Vorticism had already degenerated into the dances it inspired – the turkey trot and the bunny hop.”

Percy made an about face on Hitler and the Nazis after visiting Germany in 1937. In 1939 he published The Jews, Are They Human? which doesn’t sound like the challenge to antisemitism it apparently was (he comes firmly down on the “Yes” side). The same year he put out The Hitler Cult, a public refutation of his earlier book about the man. There is no record that he repented for his role in popularizing the bunny hop.

D.B. Wyndam Lewis co-wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Little; the first one with Peter Lorre. He was a popular newspaper columnist, “first under the name “Mustard and Cress” in The Sunday Referee until 1935 and then returned as a columnist to the Daily Mail, and later a decade-long column as Timothy Shy for the News Chronicle,” according to Wikipedia. I didn’t see anything re his stance on Hitler, but he was a humorist (humourist) so my guess is that he was against or prudently mum.

I don’t know if he chose “Mustard and Cress” and “Timothy Shy” to avoid confusion with the author of Hitler or if he was simply following the humorist tradition of writing under an alias. It’s possible he just didn’t like the name. Sophie Kihm at nameberry.com only comments on Wyndham as a last name, but she notes “The artistic and aristocratic surname would not blend in on most playgrounds – and Windy is not the choicest of nicknames.”

Sapphics
D.B. Wyndham Lewis (1891-1969)
as Timothy Shy

Exquisite torment, dainty Mrs. Hargreaves
Trips down the High Street, slaying hearts a-plenty;
Stricken and doomed are all who meet her eye-shots!
Bar Mr. Hargreaves.

Grocers a-tremble bash their brassy scales down,
Careless of weight and hacking cheese regardless;
Postmen shoot letters in the nearest ashcan,
Dogs dance in circles.

Leaving their meters, gas-inspectors gallop,
Water Board men cease cutting off the water;
Florists are strewing inexpensive posies
In Beaty’s pathway.

‘O cruel fair!’ groan butchers at their chopping,
‘Vive la belle Hargreaves!’ howls a pallid milkman;
Even the Vicar shades his eyes and mutters:
‘O dea certe.”

Back to ‘Balmoral’ trips the goddess lightly;
Night comes at length, and Mr. Hargreaves with it,
Casting his bowler glumly on the sideboard:
‘Gimme my dinner.”

You would think there has to be more than one G.K. Chesterton. His bibliography lists more than one hundred titles. Astonishing output. His Wikipedia page cautions, “Not to be confused with A.K. Chesterton.”  I was not in danger of confusing the two as I’d not heard of A.K. before. His Wikipedia page sports a complimentary “Not to be confused with…” Turns out the two are first cousins once removed.

A.K. and Percy Wyndham Lewis had overlapping stints as members of the British Union of Fascists. Sorta odd. Maybe they met. Percy was a London creature and A.K. held a position with the organization in the less posh Midlands area, but there could have been fascist mixers or such.

There are more coincidences for those willing to look. Percy apologized for his Hitler book. G.K. Chesterton was a Catholic Apologist! Both men had opinions about roasted chicken! And down and down the rabbit hole.

Triolet
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

I wish I were a jellyfish
That cannot fall downstairs:
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jelly fish
That hasn’t any cares,
And doesn’t even have to wish
‘I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs.”

To my knowledge there is no person who could be shoehorned into the role of Robert Graves doppelganger, no matter how improperly I throw the term around. It would be nice if a Rubert Greeves had retired to an extended sex vacation in the Mediterranean and kept up the name game, but no. I just like Robert Graves. It ends here.

Have a great weekend.

Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist
Robert Graves (1895-1985)

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid,
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.