(c) 1988, Times NewspapersThe Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry

Doc ref: TLS-1988-1202             Date: December 2, 1988             (Page 1333, 1 of 1).

1333 TI.S December 2-8 1988 POETRY

A conspiracy of strangeness Alan Hollinghurst HUGH HAUGHTON, editor The Chatto Book oCNonsense Poetry 53Opp. Chatto and Windus. £12.95. 0701131055

When introducing his Faber Book of Nonsense Verse nine years ago Geoffrey Grigson de­clared that "It wouldn 't be sensible to be too serious or too historical about nonsense." Hugh Haughton evidently disagrees , and the long, punning and densely informed introduc­tion to his Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry , though never solemn, takes its subject very seriously and historically indeed. To him non­sense is a form of controlled transgression , of attractive if sometimes fearful estrangement, and he is at pains to show its social and political occasions, from medieva l carnival to the in­voluntary obliquities of East European poetry today. He also believes that from immemorial children's jingles on , nonsense is an essential ingredient of literary experience : "I suspect there is a pleasure in nonsense at the core of all poetry ." Here he is close to Auden , who stipu- . lated that a good critic should like ("and by like I mean really like") "Long lists of proper names such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad" and " Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade". The combination of an ab­stract pleasure in strange words and a formal relish for riddling indirections is a major part of the appeal and purpose of nonsense.

If the gazetteer of nonsense is much ex­panded by Haughton's researches , its principal features remain the Wonderland of Carroll and the Wanderland of Lear. These two dominate the book, and exemplify the strongly literary affiliation of nonsense - Lear's to Tennysonian melancholy and Carroll's to the didactic chil­dren's verse of the previous hundred years that he parodies. Even in the spare cautionary world of the limerick , Lear's constitutional loneliness makes itself felt :

There was an Old Person of Bow, Whom nobody happened to know; So they gave him some soap, and said coldly, "We

hope You will go back directly to Bow!"

(Cold-soaping, as a term of censorious rejec­tion , is a Learism waiting to be coined .) But it is in the longer poems , such as "The Dong with a Luminous Nose" and "The Yonghy-Bonghy­Bo" (which , amazingly , is not included by Haughton) that Lear's itinerant misfit s and careworn escapees align themselves with Mariana and the Lady of Shalott :

And all who watch at the midnight hour, From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright , Moving along through the dreary night ,

"This is the hour when forth he goes, The Dong with a luminous Nose!"

Lear's absorption in Tennyson's work , and his grand project to illustrate it , are now well known : he clearly felt an affinity fo r Tenny­son's enigmatic treatment of semi-legendary ~ stories and reproduced in a simplified form the waning music with which he adumbrated the hidden subjects of his poems. It is striking, though , that Lear's poems make no attempt at the virtuoso pictorial ism of Tennyson ; a gifted landscapist of the exotic in his professional life , Lear as nonsense-writer conjures up terrain as bleak and unvisitable as a geography Ie son : the Coast of Coromandel, the Hills of the Chankly Bore, the great Gromboolian Plain , the Torrible Zone - outposts of empire and of exile .

For all this the re is a gaiety in the very im­pulse to write such nonsense for children , and in the incongruous naming of persons - Aunt Jobiska and he r Runcible Cat, the Scroobious Pip - that offsets the adult sense of loss and insortabi lity that is often the poems' drift. It is this ambivalence that has a llowed Lear to be­come , in Auden's words , "a land": hi non-ense , springing from his isolation, turns out to

encourage a conspiracy; written in term that don't make sense, it finds its audience : "chil­dren swarmed to him like settlers" . It is not just that it tap the primal poetic plea ure of non­ense but that it is al 0 a symptomatic part of

work of Tennyson, Dickens, Browning and others.

The conspiracy into which Carroll draws us is not so inward, but very much more entertain­ing. It is based on the subversion of the lesson­giving impulse in children 's literature, and the rendering absurd - in its various kings, queens, duchesses and so on - of figures of authority. Carroll 's world is alarming in its seeming arbit­rariness, but because he combines his logi­cian's sense of rules with the dissolving logics of dreams its effect is benignly anarchic. As a poet , Carroll , like Lear, can exploit the non­sense potential of serious poetry, as in the Wordsworthian "White Knight 's Song" or the Swinburnian "The Little Man That Had a Little Gun" from Sylvie and Bruno:

He shall swathe him, like mists of the morning, In platitudes luscious and limp.

Such as deck , with a deathless adorning, The Song of the Shrimp!

But his preference is for putting nonsense to the tune of the improving verse oUane Taylor,

"Supporting each man on the top of the lide", 1896, one of Htnry Holiday's illustrations 10 Lewis Carrol/'s The Hunting of the Snark, reproduced from the book r~iewed here.

Southey or Watts . He understands the contract whereby parody finds something nonsensical in its victim and magnifies the nonsense for comic ends; as well as the proximity of solem­nity and nonsense that is a running subtext of Haughton 'S book and a vindication of the theory that the lure of poetry lies in its sound­ingness, and the more sounding the more prone to absurdity .

What to Carroll was an opportunity for inno­cent play was in the Augustan period a target for fiercer satire than mere parody, though it often embraced that and - as in much of Pope's literary satire - derived a vicarious exhi laration from the imitation of what it deplored. Haughton gives us the celebrated lines from Book One of The Dunciad: "On cold Decem­ber fragrant chaplets blow , I And heavy har­vests nod beneath the snow", . which are a parody of bad continuity in poetry and have their own surreal beauty ; but nothing from The Art of Sinking , which is in part a kind of anti­poetics exalting poetry into nonsense, and particularly into the nonsensicalness of grandi­loquence. Pope's bits of cod " Profund" dic­tion , such as the call to uncork a bottle -" Apply thine Engine to the spungy Door, I Set Bacchus from his gla sy Prison free" - are prime examples of an intrinsic nonsense in metaphor , while the lines

I'd call them Mountains, but can't call them so, For fear to wrong them with a Name too low; While the fair Vales beneath so humbly lie , That even humble seems a Term too high

were urely in Carroll ' mind when he wrote the exchange in Through the Looking-Glass that Haughton cites:

"When you say 'hill '," the Queen interrupted, "I could show you hills , in comparison with which you 'd call that a valley. "

"No, I houldn't", said Alice, surprised at cont ra­dicting her at last: "a hill can't be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense - "

The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it -'non!;ense' if you like ;" she said , "but fve he-ard

the literature of it age, throwing light on com­

parable ~~~~ip,n I ,,~.n~ •. fa!1 ta~,tlc~r.i~~s'l ,in, \the .1 I " ,t .. '* j r ..; .~ '1 I J ~ " • _ I •

nonsenSe, compared to which that would be as sensi­ble as a dictionary!"

Pope , as an exorcist of nonsense, had a refined nose for where it could be found .

The caustic, corrective nonsense of Augus­tan satire is , however , well represented by lines from Henry Carey's Namby-Pamby: or, A Panegyric on the New Versification, parodying Ambrose Philips (also an Art of Sinking victim) with manic animus:

Namby-Pamby PiJly-piss, Rhimy pimed on Missy-Miss . Namby-Pamby's little rhymes , Little jingle, little chimes, To repeat to little miss, Piddling ponds of pissy-piss

and so on. His distaste for what we now think of as Keatsian or neo-Elizabethan coinage of words ending in -y would have made short work of the infantilism of Lear as displayed in this same volume : "And when boats or ships came near him I He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled a bell" . While the procedures of nonsense re­main similar over 600 years , the attitudes which inform it are shown to have varied diametrically.

The playful , Scriblerian side of Augustanism is seen contributing to another tradition (ex­emplified by the bench in the walks of St Catherine's College , Oxford, which bears the inscription "ORE STABIT FORTIS ARARE PLACET ORE STAT" - "0 rest a bit, for 'tis a rare place to rest at"): that of the cod transla­tion. Haughton gives us Swift's "Love Song"­"Apud in is almi des ire I Mimis tres Ine ver re qui re" - as a precursor of the homophonous Mots d'Heures; Gousses, Rames of the suspi­ciously macaronic-sounding Luis d'Antin van Rooten and of Ernst landI's delightful transli­teration of Wordsworth :

mai hart Iieb zapfen eibe hold er renn bohr in sees kai so was sieht wenn mai lauf! begehen so es sieht nahe emma mahen so biet wenn arschel grollt horleckmitei ! scht steil dies fader rosse mahen in teig kurt wisch mai desto bier baum deutsche deutsch bajonett schur alp eiertier

The nonsense of " Un petit d 'un petit I S'etonne aux Hailes", of course , is heightened by the critical apparatus which seeks to inflict sense on the purely phonetic assemblage of words it annotates- and, after a fashion , succeeds. This is nonsense at its most sophisticated . George du Maurier's limericks, too , are enchanting -especially

II existe une Espinstere a Tours, Un peu vite , et qui porte toujours

Un ulsteur peau-de-phoque , Un chapeau bilicoque,

Et des nicrebocqueurs en velours

which exploits and augments the pre-Franglais strain of French vocabulary responsible for words such as redingote and boule-dogue.

Some nonsense procedures are pretty rudimentary : Haughton includes items, such as Paul Scheerbart's "Monologue of the Crazed Mastodon" ("ZCpke! ZCpke! I Mekkimapsi -muschibr6ps") and Christian Morgenstern 's "The Great Lalula" (" Kroklokwafzi ? Semememi!"), which are as pure as they are crude . Other techniques which el(asp~rate but lack the estranging dimension of true nonsense are the interpolation of jingle lines into straightforward ba llads or of meaningless syl­lables into words , as in Anthony Bonner's rendering of a poem by the fourteenth-century Cerveri de Gerona : " lflimit iflimis hafl amard foflomor meflemen toflomo eflemerr aflama­mioflomong [sicl goofloomood peofleomeo­pie" (" It is hard for men to err among good people") , which is a chameleonic precursor of the modern arp language , in which the syllable arp arpis arpintrarpodarpuced barpefarpore arpevarperarpy varpowarpel sarpound . This is a way, like gniklat sdrawkcab, in which chil­dren can scramble their conversation . But it does not make for very arpabsarporbarping varperse .

Haughton remains optimistic for nonsense in our time, though the Surrealists' knowing appropriation of its procedures has robbed them of some of their force , and memorable film treatments of Alice by Jonathan Mille r and Jan Svankmajer take the form of Freudian glosses on texts to which a certain innocent self-sufficiency is es entia!. Smilingly gnomic

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(c) 1988, Times NewspapersThe Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry

Doc ref: TLS-1988-1202             Date: December 2, 1988             (Page 1334, 1 of 1).

1334 1LS December 2-41 1988 POETRY

tales by Vasko Popa, Marin Sorescu and Peter Handke included here are intimations of another whole context for the nonsense of rid­dles "and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade": the personal fables of Lear become the political fables of those living under totalitar­ianism.

The combination of personal and public dis­orientation in modernist art, and its frequent obscurantism, are subjects touched on, but understandably not followed through. The procedures of The Waste Land owe something to the tradition of mad songs and centos in­cluded in the book; and it would at least have been good to have Henry Reed's nonsense parody of Eliot, "Chard Whitlow". Much of early Auden is nonsense - coli aged together, as Isherwood has described it, from disjected fragments of other poems - and the surreal dislocations of The Ormors would have been worth representing. But there is so much more

nonsense about these days, in poisonous doublespeak and self-reproducing jargon, that it seems to have left nonsense poetry itself far behind; our age still awaits its Dunciad. The real home of nonsense , perhaps, has been in the modernist novel - in Finnegans Wake, obviously, but also in the fantastical incon­sequence of Firbank - and in more popular forms , such as Wodehouse's sweetly brainless lingo; though one could say that the way had been paved by James's protracted dissevera­tion of writing from comprehensible speech. James, indeed, was a secret master of the non­sensical sonorities of society, as is testified to by his frequent notebook lists of names culled from the press for possible use in novels and stories: litanies of social mystique as well as prose poems of sheer onomastic delight which take us back to Auden's lists of ships in the Iliad: Lonely - Button - Ftler - Dolman - Rushout - Chad

- Trantum - German - Audrey - Ivy - Castanet -Bavard - Rust - Plaster - Buxbridge - Peachey -Pillar - Pontifex - Trigg - Suchbury - Pinching -Pulse - Gleed - Constant - Six - Frowd - Terbot -Wherry - Gamage - Fluid - Welcbford - Fancourt­Trinder - Trender.

The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry is a generous compilation, encompassing hun­dreds of pages of material untouched-on by this review. Because Haughton wants to make the ' case that nonsense poetry is contiguous with and contagious to the rest of poetry, he includes a fair amount of stuff that might have been omitted. Harry Graham's. "Consolation" -

Weep not for little Leonie, Abducted by a French Marquis! Though loss of honour was a wrench, Just think how its's improved her French!

- is exemplary good sense, in the tradition of

The taste of the time Douglas Dunn KINGSLEY AMIS, editor The Amis Anthology: A personal choice of English verse 36Opp. Century Hutchinson . £12.95 . 0091735254

An anthology that represents a literary figure's favourite poems can be expected to resist most of the usual approaches to a review. Its pur­poses are pleasure and the sharing of it , or the opportunity to preserve the record of one man's taste. As Kingsley Amis says, a collec­tion of favourites is not to be confused with its compiler's decision on which English poems he happens to think are the best. A personal, "unfathomable" element is what he points to as the explanation of his likes and dislikes. Yet poetry in the English language is an important subject, and Amis is an influential man, or, at least , he seems to speak to and for a particular aspect of English taste. There could be some point in trying to identify that taste or Amis's personal expression of it.

By and large his choice of poems conveys what looks like a preference for plain , honest feeling. In his note on Edward Thomas, who has eleven poems here , he writes: "How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel , since you have only his word for it , is hard to discover , but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it." While this wins my approval - that is , I agree with Amis that the trust he speaks of is harder to describe than many critics would have us believe - I doubt if gut-reaction is the whole story. What I think he might be driving at in his remarks on Thomas and throughout his collection is the virtue of an Englishness in poetic writing, and its appreciation, that he would claim is perma­nent and indigenous. It seems to make him prefer simplicity and directness, but it is just as true that some of the poems he includes are metrically ornamented or intellectually tricky .

• LlBRAIRIE DROZ

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Marvell's "The Garden" leads him to admit to a love of "the constant play of classical-my tho­logical-philosophical-religious reference here (as much as I understand of it , that is)" . At the same time it appears that that kind of English poetry appeals to him less consistently than he makes out. Drayton's "Agincourt" is among his favourites , but none of John Donne's poems has succeeded in attracting the same approval, while in his introduction (very short) he explains the absence of Shakespeare's non­dramatic verse by saying that he finds some­thing missing, or wrong, in the sonnets. A per­sonal choice is always likely to blush with eccentricities, and one's own would be no ex­ception, but the taste that prefers Leigh Hunt to Donne and Dryden , and yet finds room for Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" and Lyte's "Abide With Me" might be calcu­lated to try the patience of literary readers, no matter how it might console those who enjoy the coincidence of piety and verse on a Sunday afternoon .

Gray's "Elegy" exerts a considerable pres­ence in the collection. "A great poem, and incidentally a great Rightie poem", he says of it ; "no work of literature ever argued more persuasively that the poor and ignorant are better off as they are ." Amis's interpretation does not overlap on mine - an insignificant discrepancy, perhaps - but what it might be valid to deplore is that he glosses his reading of a great poem through a surrender to one of the imperfect ideologies of the 1980s. Political mis­use of old verse has the effect of making anachronisms of both the original poem and its commentator. Time is disjointed , and that - it is my view - has the same status as a lie , and a lie against poetry is a considerable thing.

Pope finds himself here with "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady", a remark­able poem , indeed , but perhaps less true of its author than the Epistles, Essays and The Dun-

dad. Satire appeals to Amis hardly at all ; his liking is for the short lyrical poem, or the inci­sive metrical performance of the order of . Davidson's stunning "A Runnable Stag", which stands high in his list of favourites , although I find it hard to decide if it is better than "Thirty Bob a Week". Augustanism, which is , after all, an ism and like all such words ought to be banned, finds little space in his choices. So , too, with the Romantics: Shel­ley is dismissed ; there is no Byron. The "un­fathomable" deviousness of mind and experi­ence that leads him to choose one poem instead of another obliges him to prefer Wordsworth's "She was a phantom of delight" to the Immor­tality Ode, "Tintern Abbey" or "The Solitary Reaper". Southey'S "After Blenheim" and Thomas Campbell's battle poems enter his pri­vate canon , however, as does Keats with "Ode to Melancholy" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Victorians such as Tennyson and Browning do a bit better, but he opts for sim­ple, anthology-Browning, not his best by a very long way - aboriginal English taste will resist Browning's best for ever, in my opinion -although Tennyson's "Tithonus" is best Tenny­son, undoubtedly.

Housman and Kipling attract thirteen and seven poems respectively. Amis's anti-socialist particularity in his interpretation of Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is as much a case of special pleading - that is , misuse - as what he draws from Gray's "Elegy". Kipling's poem succeeds and provokes because of its deliberate timelessness - "As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race". It is a vigorous riposte to sayers of sooths and upholders of maxims; it assaults·the human instinct for an inflexible order that betrays an opposing instinct for better life in fluidity and imagination.

Other prejudices intrude and guide Amis's choice of favourites . Yeats slips in through

The fourteen-line fix Kath.erine Duncan-Jones CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER The Collected Sonnets of Charles Tennyson Turner Edi ted by F. B. Pinion and M. Pinion 25 1pp. Macmillan. £35. 0333436512

Charles (Tennyson) Turner's more famous younger brother, Alfred , compared his com­pulsive writing of I n M emoriam lyrics to "dull narcotics, numbing pain" . For several of the talented Tennysons life was, in Johnson's phrase , a pill too bitter to take without gilding, and alcohol, opiates and verse composition played alternate roles in their several attempts to brave the struggle of life. Charles, who abandoned the name of Tennyson for that of Turner in order to receive an inheritance in 1835, succeeding also to his uncle Samuel Tur­ner's cure of souls at Grasby, had much of his young manhood blighted by severe opium addiction . It seems to have been because of this that he was separated from his wife, Louisa (sister of Alfred's future wife, Emily Sell-

wood) , for r,nost of the first decade of their marriage. According to the editors of this. the firs t modern edition , "one of the stabilizing factors during the remainder of his life was undoubtedly his habit of writing sonnets" .

For the reader , the fix is often mild , though sometimes of tear-jerking intensity. Unlike Alfred , Charles did not seek the challenge of great metrical complexity, adapting the relatively undemanding "English" , or Shakespearean, form of the sonnet, with sestet variations. He treats the form for the most part like a loose-knit lyrical stanza, with little ten­sion or epigrammatic tautness . Both at best and at worst , his sonnets are "period pieces", more inescapably rooted in their time and place than his Laureate brother's work . Among the embarrassing worst I would place the two-headed "The Vacant Cage" (LXIV, LXV) , describing a decision to take a dead canary to the taxidermist, and "Emmeline" (CCXLV), a prurient-seeming reflection on the growth to womanhood of a child he has known since she was two feet high . Yet chil ­dren and animals are also the subjects of the best sonnets, such as the rightly famous "Letty's Globe" (CCCVI) and "The Drowned

Hardy's "Ruined Maid"; and some of the poems by Smart and Hood and Goldsmith be­long in a book of comic but not nonsense verse. The advantage of the inclusiveness is that it makes you think; but the appearance towards the end of the book of Elizabeth Bishop's ra­diantly sensical "Twelfth Morning" alerts one to a problem one had hardly liked to acknow­ledge: that with the exception of Lear and Car­roll the authors are rarely represented by their most important or characteristic work, but by the scroobious dubia and miscellanea which are found on its margins. This is in part Haughton's point (writers of the grandeur of Blake, Coleridge and Yeats feel the affinity of the nonsense-world); but it gives so big a book a faintly debilitated air . None the less, it is the best compilation of its kind there is , and worth the very reasonable price for liugh Haughton's introduction alone. Everyone should give one to someone.

being patronized: "Most of Yeats's poems, however appealing, are nonsense of one sort or another, some of it ('Easter 1916') vicious non­sense . .. ". Owen, Graves, Betjeman, Mac­Neice, Auden and Larkin (twelve poems) are present in some strength, not always - Auden and MacNeice - with great conviction. Amer­ican poetry gets short shrift - Longfellow, and John Crowe Ransom's "Captain Carpenter", which isn't as good as "Philomela" or "Blue Girls" (in my opinion) . "Needless to sayan American" , Amis says, pointing to "the first bad poet" (as opposed to congenital duffers) , and indicating Poe. His business here is to censure Hopkins's "obsessive affectation of singularity", which is just , and unjust , in the same breath.

It is easy enough to acknowledge what "sing­ularity" leads to - writing to theory, deliberate deformations of language , negligence of shape and melody , the replacement of style and feel­ing by novelty and alleged "innovations", reck­less experiments and the worst of modernism . But something puts the brakes on to prevent going the whole way with Amis's taste and what it represents. Apart from his political views (exercised on poems that don 't deserve them) his taste seems to me grounded on a will­ingness to narrow mind, spirit and intelligence in favour of an exaggerated senseof native"feel­ing". It cramps and inhibits the Englishness for which otherwise he speaks. In the end , itis a taste in poetry of which to be suspicious, even when the individual poems that constitute it are enjoyable and worthy . Chaucer, Henry­son , Dunbar, Shakespeare, Donne , Jonson, Milton , Dryden, Pope , Burns, Smart , Clare , Wordsworth , Shelley, Byron, Clough , best Browning, Yeats, Eliot , Edwin Arlington Robinson, major Auden - these might not be omissions merely, or fields for selecting minor poems, but embarrassments to Amis's taste.

Spaniel" (CCCXIV), as well as many less famil iar , such as "On finding a small fl y crushed in a book" (CCLXXIII ), "Cowper's three hares" (CCCXL) and "Cynotaphium" (LXII) . When he takes on more ambi tious or public subjects, such as the new theology of Strauss and Renan , he too often descends to bluster, the poetic equivalent of "Disgusted, Lincolnshire" . Sometimes child and animal successfully combine , as in "Rose and Cushie" (CCCXXXII) , in which Turner displays un­usual sympathy for the common lot of a cow whose calf has been taken away for slaughter: "But little Rose, who loved the sheep and kine , I Ran home to tell of Cushie 's broken heart. "

At best , Turner is an original rural and domestic miniaturist , who can achieve remark­able effects comparable to those of a Pre­Raphaelite painter such as Ford Madox Brown , with sharply observed details placed in a wide-sweeping frame of place and time . Like his Laureate brother, he shows remarkable sty­listic consistency in the course of forty or more years' addiction to the sonnet-drug. Like his brother, too, he is fortunate in his modern editors, who introduce, edit and annotate the sonnets with authority and good sense .