Speccie hatchet job by 17th July
 

Larkin on Ashbery? He is recorded as saying that he prefers strawberry, though it was ostensibly a joke about his own deafness. W.S, Gilbert on T.S. Eliot? Happy days!

No. 2807: hatchet job

In 1865 Henry James wrote a brutal review of Our Mutual Friend. You are invited to submit a hatchet job by a well-known author of your choice on a book or poem by another well-known writer (150 words/16 lines). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 17 July.

John Betjeman on 'The Wasteland'.

God preserve us from the verses
Full of lots and lots of quotes,
Most of them in foreign lingo,
All of them bestrewn with notes.

God preserve us from the poet
Scribbling in his cubbyhole,
Malcontent, obscure and arid,
Of his wintry, withered soul.

God preserve us from the Moderns
Writing for their favoured few.
God preserve us from the Wasteland.
God preserve us from the new.

God preserve us, Mr Eliot,
From these godforsaken things.
Bring us back the tried and tested.
Bring us poetry that sings.

John, lovely; you've caught him just right and especially apt given his telling lines in Summoned By Bells both on Mr Eliot, his schoolmaster, and that lovely passage about (roughly - I haven't got my copy here) "Every time there comes a wind from Oxford,
To blow the candles out, I light them up again". A winner if there's any justice - and a worthwhile take on JB in any case.

Alas, Nigel - I fear it was Cambridge...

Thanks Ann - of course it was! Why did my memory trip me on that? Probably just the lazy tendency to see them both as Oxbridge - a kind of community of the resented.

‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ reviewed by Geoffrey Willans

This book is about a skool that the auther call ‘Rugby’. This is a very pore start becos Rugby is not a skool but a roten game, as any fule kno.

The skool bully is called Flashman. He remind me of Grabber, eksept he hav never won the Mrs Joyful prize for rafia-work. Flashman and his frends roast Tom Brown over a fire, which is a wizard weeze. I shall try it on Fotherington-Tomas.

But most of the book is garstly and full of caracters like George Arthur who is a swot and a weed and uterly wet. (The auther do not sa if he hav a face like a squished tomato.) The head beak is portraid as a kindly figure which make the book hihgly unconvinsing. Every chapter begin with some lines of filthy peotry, or even Latin. The boys sa there prayers and do lots of homework. Enuff said!

Now you do Thomas Hughes reviewing Down with Skool. Great stuff!

What's the difference between Cambridge and Oxford? At Cambridge they are cleverer and betray their country.

Agreed! top notch.

I should have thanked Nigel for his kind words and I do. And you, Graham. Didn't someone point out that this can be a bit of a Gordon Brown moment. Support from the poor man was always the kiss of death.

I don't know whether Graham is supposed to be Gordon or whether I am. If the latter, I'm flattered as I knew him and he was a much better man than most I've known - and one of the very brightest. That dreadful 'pact' - positively Faustian as it turned out - was his tragic downfall and almost from that moment on it was one of the saddest declines of our times in British politics. Somebody ought to write poetry about it - though not you John. You'll only seethe and then take the mick! I mean something which tries to communicate a personal tragedy which had truly wide consequences. Not JB territory either; more Soutar crossed with Lochead if such can be inagined.

In any case, I'm sure you're proof against being hexed - and it is a very good piece indeed.

John, your Betjeman/Eliot is a treat. And with your last line:

xxBring us poetry that sings

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

Actually some of Eliot sings rather poignantly. I've always thought Prufrock was singable. And some of those early lyrics too. He got religion which didn't do him any good at all. But Betj sings more for my money.

A. E. Housman on G. M. Hopkin’s "Pied Beauty"
 

Father, this is sloppy stuff;
You speak to God right off the cuff
In meter which is out of whack;
Couple-coloured Holstein white and black.

Your scansion’s slack, your rhythm’s sprung;
For lesser wrongs, I’ve seen lads hung.
Why mess with stuff you can’t do well?
Please stick to candle, book, and bell.

Be happy with your cloistered life,
You’ll never have a fractious wife;
Instead you can explore the joys
That clerics seek with younger boys.

(A predilection, I’ll admit
I suffer from myself, a bit;
And hint about, from time to time
In meter, using proper rhyme.)

Douglas, I think that is apt and funny.

Douglas - deft!

Harold Pinter on 'Paradise Lost'
 

Hallelujah!
Satan got slung the fuck out of Heaven.

We can’t have him giving people fruit, can we?
Feeding the starving
Without even trying to turn a profit is obscene.

And so was asking questions
About how that fascist bully boy God runs things,
Isn’t that right, Mr Milton?

So yes, you can just fuck off, Satan.
Spend eternity in the agonies of Tartarus.
That’ll teach you to try and think for yourself.

I bet that moron Bush
And that loathsome toad Blair would approve,
But it makes me sick to my fucking guts, chum.

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

A good one, Douglas. And you're right, if they can't rhyme or scan properly, let's hang 'em.

John Hegley on Ezra's Pounds 'The Cantos'
 

when John first took a look
at Ezra’s book
he couldn’t make any sense of it
so he wiped his glasses on his shirt
thinking that dirt
on the lenses might be the reason
although it wasn’t
and he looked again
bits of it looked a bit like English he thought
but other bits were in Chinese
and reading that isn’t exactly a breeze
at least not if you’re from Luton
Pound
was a lot less fun than walking your faithful hound
John decided as he reached for his doggie’s lead
and his doggie readily agreed

HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds reviewed as if by Bram Stoker.
 

“Mr Wells’ latest literary effusion, unappealing, appals. Its few characters are lazy stereotypes. Defiantly-blinkered astronomer; vanquished soldier, compensating through unrealistic extravagant ambition; curate, developing religious mania... While I am no apologist for English army or clergy, here are men of straw indeed! The journalist ‘hero’ becomes despairingly suicidal, reflecting this novel’s hollow heart: self-flagellating defeatism!
The plot, clumsy as any moribund walking tripod, clanks heavily to its end. Sickeningly, Wells plays a ‘God on our side’ card, late in this game (deus ex microbia !); equivocating though: “To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.” (Evidently Martians do conquer Venus.)
Outrageously, one clumsily injected theme (blood predation) blatantly plagiarises my ‘Dracula’ published last year. Could Wells not devise some equally horrific, more plausible motivating predilection– perhaps, aliens harvesting specimens for experimentation à la Doctor Moreau ?
(I suggest this, gratis, for any future editions… pending legal action.)”

[Date references: Wells’ War of the Worlds, 1898;
Stoker’s Dracula, 1897; Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896]

'The Faerie Queene' reviewed by W. Shakespeare

What spiteful Muse it was who rashly urgèd
This undertaking on poor Edmund Spenser
I cannot say. In verse obscure and turgid,
No tale was ever drearier or denser.
The author owneth that his dull intention’s
To wrap ‘in allegorical devices’
A list of cloudy virtues - their declension’s
A prospect that but meagrely entices.
‘Tis said Elizabeth was mighty pleased
(But none can name for me the fool who said it),
And Spenser by a pension was much eased,
E’en though Her Majesty hath never read it.

Yet do I thank thee, Edmund; while no Orpheus,
Thy song hath brought me to the arms of Morpheus.

Brian - you at your best. I remember an earlier Shakespeare spoof with pleasure.

Dorothy Parker reviews Jorge Luis Borges
 

I am sure you remember Snow White, that little strumpet dreaming of a man who could come bump her in the night. Well, the witch, portrayed as old and realistic, in that story goes "Mirror, mirror..." and I'll stop right there, because it seems that's as far as Mr. Borges got before writing this new collection of his, "Labyrinths." Like two mirrors facing each other, Borges reflects endlessly on mirrors. Also, mazes and incunabula. I have only cracked mirrors, and I try to avoid their eye at all times, just as men avoid mine, yet I am not too biased to say I don't give a damn as to where his footnotes lead or which of his cliff hangers I can hang myself from. The cover is a pretty little thing, black and blue, like a trampled violet or a bruised heart, but it's what's inside that counts. Or so everyone has told me, though the Princes in my life have certainly known better...

Excellent capture of Shakespeare, Brian. Well done. Try to get it in before the deadline this time.

Thank you, Marcus.

The only time I've ever missed a deadline was when the idea for the piece came to me after the closing date!

And after Closing Time no doubt.

John, there is no closing time chez Allgar.

Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea reviewed as if by Herman Melville
 

“Recounting flaws in Verne’s escapist novels grows as tiresome as reading them, if easier. Armchair dilettante, no seaman, here he offers us Nemo- nobody! -a Captain scantily sketched; his crew, ciphers. Their frankly fantastical submarine, Nautilus- ramming warships to wreckage? Any ordinary sea-swell would overturn its salon (ridiculously furnished with priceless artworks and fragile specimen cases) into shambles! Like Nemo’s library (12,000 tomes surely doomed onboard to dampness and decay), book-learning heavily waterlogs Verne’s prose; he didactically catechises us in biological nomenclature, listing, ever listing… Intermittent passages of chase or conflict whet the appetite then disappoint; lacking salt and savour of manly reality, these are shallowly staged set-pieces.
Verne treats encountered sea-creatures as mere animals, lacking that potent heady symbolism which mariners feel marrow-deep!
Eventually, pasteboard protagonists Arronax, Conseil and Land abandon ship, their souls untransfigured by numinous experience- surely the absurdest impossibility of all.”


It felt strange, writing a mock-panning of one of my favourite books and authors!

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick reviewed as if by Jules Verne.
 

(It's only fair to allow JV a reciprocal response to HM!)

“Mr Melville himself manned a whaler; supposedly advantageous (purporting authenticity), actually this renders him regrettably biased and preoccupied. He parrots much hoary lore regarding whales, casting his net undiscerningly wide.
His novel’s bizarrely obsessive focus obstructs methodical cataloguing and weighing of interesting observations alleged by mariners.
Consider the St Elmo’s Fire that seemingly invests Captain Ahab’s upraised harpoon with mystic power. Melville missed his opportunity to discourse educationally upon electricity’s properties; uses; hazards; and experimenters (Franklin, Volta, Ampère…) who afforded humanity its benefits.
He also devotes insufficient space to oceanography; savants whose interest in cetaceans is scientific rather than exploitative commercially; and technical details of the vessel Pequod’s construction.
Raw emotions run rife (vengefulness; authoritarianism; blasphemy) with fatalistic paganism shown practised and vindicated!
Some anatomical allusions are distasteful, even ribald. Numerous deaths occur, futilely.
Philosophical readers would shudder to encounter this feverish, unedifying volume in drawing-room or public library.”

I realise that this is probably akin to heresy in some people's eyes!

Ogden Nash on Ulysses

I have read some novels that are akin to sailing on a calm sea and others that resemble sailing on much crueler seas,
And into the latter category I would place James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
The whole novel is so rich in language that one couldn’t make it even a bit richer,
Which is why it is regarded as the prime example of Modernist Literature
And Mr. Joyce has undoubtedly been given due deference,
But it is awfully hard work for a man without a diploma in Ancient Greek to wade through all the mythological characters he chooses to reference.
And to be frank, if this novel had a beauty, it would not be in the flowery language that this novel’s beauty lies,
Nor indeed in the myriad of different styles that he chooses to utilise.
And I have been told by certain critics that Leopold Bloom’s peregrinations north and south of the River Liffey
Are a bit iffy,
But sadly I only struggled through the first three chapters about the musings and urinations of Stephen Daedalus
Before I left the rest of the book readerless.

Byron on Heaney - a bit of a last-minute effort.

The favourite bard of those who dish out prizes
Is Heaney, Irish and potato-faced,
He's slow and thoughtful, like a man who's wise is,
And never jars you with a lapse of taste,
With phrases quotable, or with surprises.
He shows us farmers' boots, all mud-encased,
Plus intimations of the deep beyond
That come from groping frogspawn in a pond.

Perhaps you ought to read him if you're tickled
By thoughts of ancient corpses gold as honey
That once in some far northern bog got pickled.
That's nice enough – but I would not put money
On Seamus when posterity has sickled
Our crop of poets. Won't they think it funny
That he wrote reams on farmyard and on cow
And rarely thought about describing now?