English Humour for Beginners
Page 9
He did, under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll. 180,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass were sold in his lifetime. The books also gave many phrases to the English language and many immortal characters to English folklore, from the Mad Hatter through Humpty-Dumpty to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Yet, icily and on innumerable occasions, he persisted in saying: ‘Mr Dodgson neither claims nor acknowledges any connections with the books not published under his name.’ He wanted to be remembered as the author of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.
Alexander Woollcott (among others) pointed out the discrepancy between ‘the man [who] wrote the most enchanting nonsense in the English language’ and the ‘puttering, fussy, fastidious, didactic old bachelor’. But Professor Peter Alexander, himself a logician, comments: ‘… the will to escape was joined with the ability to escape; an ability which depended on a detailed knowledge of, and an interest in, logic. Without Dodgson the pedantic logician, Carroll the artist would have been of considerably less importance; there was no discrepancy.’*
Of course, there is no discrepancy. If we could only see, we could always discern the one, whole man in such apparently contradictory characters.
Many attempts have been made to explain Dodgson on different levels. He was a homosexual, they say; he was in love with Alice and the other little girls under ten whose company he sought so eagerly (although it has never been alleged that he behaved improperly to any one of them). At one stage he did indeed take to photographing little girls with no clothes on but, it seems, got frightened and gave it up. It has also been said that he was in love with Alice’s governess and used the little girl as a cover-up.
One simple and plausible explanation of his pursuit of children lies in the fact that he suffered from a terrible stammer. That disability made him aloof, lonely and shy. He could trust his pen; he could never trust his tongue. Perhaps it was his stammer that drove him to children. He could relax in their company. They even loved listening to his voice.
He was one man, a compact and complicated human unit like most of us. The logician and the writer of nonsense tales complemented each other, on most occasions beautifully and charmingly. Roger Green reports how the child actress, Isa Bowman, begged him in a letter for ‘millions of hugs and kisses’. Mathematician Dodgson and artist Carroll united their forces to give this reply:
Millions must mean 2 millions at least … and I don’t think you’ll manage it more than 20 times a minute – [a sum follows]. I couldn’t go on hugging and kissing more than 12 hours a day; and I wouldn’t like to spend Sundays that way. So you see it would take 23 weeks of hard work. Really, my dear child, I cannot spare the time.
Viscount Simon – who knew Dodgson, he was Simon’s tutor at Christ Church – also quotes a riddle, typical of both Dodgson and Lewis Carroll.*
A man wanted to go to the theatre, which would cost him IS 6d, but he only had IS. So he went into a Pawnbroker’s shop and offered to pledge his shilling for a loan. The Pawnbroker satisfied himself that the shilling was genuine and lent him 9d on it.
The man then came out of the shop with 9d, and the Pawnbroker’s ticket for IS. Outside he met a friend to whom he offered to sell the Pawnbroker’s ticket and the friend bought it from him for 9d. He now had 9d from the Pawnbroker and another 9d from the friend and so was able to go to the theatre.
‘The question is,’ said Lewis Carroll, ‘who lost what?’
YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM
Lewis Carroll
‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,
‘And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
Do you think, at your age, it is right?’
‘In my youth,’ Father William replied to his son,
‘I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.’
‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door –
Pray, what is the reason of that?’
‘In my youth,’ said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
‘I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment – one shilling the box –
Allow me to sell you a couple?’
‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak –
Pray how did you manage to do it?’
‘In my youth,’ said his father, ‘I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.’
‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose –
What made you so awfully clever?’
‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough,’
Said his father; ‘don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!’
THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER
Lewis Carroll
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright –
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done –
‘It’s very rude of him,’ she said,
‘To come and spoil the fun!’
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead –
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand!’
‘If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.’
The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head –
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.
But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat –
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.
Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more –
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.’
‘But wait a bit,’ the Oysters cried,
‘Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!’
‘No hurry!’ said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.
‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,
‘Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed –
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.’
‘But not on us!’ the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
‘After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!’
‘The night is fine,’ the Walrus said.
‘Do you admire the view?’
‘It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf –
I’ve had to ask you twice!’
‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
‘To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘The butter’s spread too thick!’
‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none –
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
Gilbert
I had spent only about six weeks in London when Dr Kiss, the Economic Editor of my Budapest newspaper, came over for a visit. That was – I have said it before – in 1938 and I, the paper’s London correspondent, had to accompany such a senior member whenever I could. That was no great sacrifice as Dr Kiss was a charming and very erudite man. He knew English much better than I did, he had translated many English authors into Hungarian and I remember reading quite a few books by H. G. Wells in his translation. We were walking across Leicester Square when he saw a neon sign and exclaimed: ‘The Mikado! Let’s go in!’ My heart sank. ‘But that’s a musical,’ I pleaded. ‘An operetta.’ ‘Yes, it is,’ he agreed. ‘But there are operettas and operettas.’
In we went at three o’clock in the afternoon. For the first and last time in my life I sat through four performances of a film. If they had given four more performances, I would have stayed. Dr Kiss left after one performance, I had to be thrown out at eleven o’clock. I was enchanted and excited: this was a new, grotesque, yet – for me – perfectly sensible and impressive world. I enjoyed not only the wit but also the technical perfection of the verses; even the music made me laugh aloud with delight.
But as my English was far from perfect, I missed a lot. First thing next morning, I trotted over to the Times Book Club – the leading lending library of those days – and asked, rather timidly, whether The Mikado existed in print. I hardly expected to be able to obtain the libretto of a sixty-years-old operetta in book-form, but I got it. I had not read Keats, Shelley, Browning or Eliot in the original yet, but in a few weeks’ time I knew all the verses of The Mikado by heart. And a few weeks later Patience, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, Pinafore, and The Gondoliers followed. I knew the main songs of these operas by heart long before I ever saw them on the stage. It was a long time before I learnt that Gilbert and Sullivan were not just a writer and a composer, but a cult – a national secret like cricket. I cannot, naturally, claim to be the greatest living Gilbert and Sullivan expert; but I am sure I am the greatest living Hungarian expert on them.
William Schwenck Gilbert was born in London, near the Strand, on November 18, 1836. He is a real Victorian in that Queen Victoria ascended the throne seven months after his birth. He got his middle name from some distant German relation and he detested it. During the Franco-Prussian war he was nearly arrested because of it, as the Parisians thought he was a Prussian spy. Gilbert’s father, also called William, was a naval surgeon but when, at an early age, he inherited some money, he retired and wrote a few novels. Gilbert jr. first became a government clerk and stuck to the hated job for four years. But inheriting money is a favourite English folk-custom: it’s constantly being done, often from long-forgotten aunts or cousins thrice removed. Gilbert was no exception: he inherited a few hundred pounds and later he said that it was the happiest day of his life when he was able to send his letter of resignation to the department of education. He entered himself as a student at the Middle Temple and read for the law. He was called to the bar and became an extremely unsuccessful barrister. In four years he had fewer than twenty briefs and made less than £100. But he loved the law; it formed his way of thinking and when he wrote that ‘The law is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ he really meant it.
While at the bar, he wrote innumerable plays, sketches, verses, libretti – all unperformed and unpublished. Everything was sent to theatres and editors; everything was rejected. In 1861 a new magazine, Fun, accepted one piece by him and the editor was so much impressed by his wit that he sent for him. Gilbert became a regular contributor to Fun, and later its dramatic critic. He wrote nearly all the Bab Ballads for Fun. He thought little of his comic verse and still less of his own drawings illustrating them. They were written – he said later – in a hurry, mostly because they were needed to fill in space. When they were published in book form he wrote – with quite uncharacteristic modesty – that he ‘ventured to publish the little pictures with them, because while they are certainly quite as bad as the ballads, they are not much worse’.
The Ballads as well as the pictures are classics of English humorous literature. ‘Though essentially English,’ writes Hesketh Pearson,* ‘nothing quite like them has been produced by any other Englishman. They contain both satire and nonsense, but these ingredients are merely incidental to their composition. They are simply jokes, and some people thought jokes in bad taste. But the quality that makes them unique and may make them immortal is the sudden imaginative perception that human beings and the condition of their existence on this planet are inherently ridiculous. While the imperfection of life is a source of sadness in the great poets, it is a source of silliness in “Bab”, who created an art of utter absurdity.’
Underestimating his own achievements was not one of Gilbert’s outstanding characteristics. He could not tolerate adverse criticism. (The favourable variety he tolerated with great patience, like the rest of us.) He was oversensitive, irascible, overbearing; but he was also honest and straightforward. He always meant what he said, and – worse – he always said what he meant. This was the real reason for his quarrel with Sullivan.
W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan had met fleetingly before the beginning of the Gilbert-and-Sullivan era proper. Indeed, they had written a little burlesque opera together for German Reed. It was called Thespis and it was a flop. The critic for The Times found Gilbert’s story lively and original and Sullivan’s music pretty and fascinating, so he was ‘rather disappointed’ that the public failed to respond to the piece. But that is what happened. Thespis was never revived.
Four years later, in 1875 the impresario Richard D’Oyly Cart
e, manager of the Royalty Theatre, was putting on a musical which was expected to be a great hit but which was short. Rather bravely, considering the dismal failure of Thespis, he asked Gilbert and Sullivan to collaborate on a little something to fill in time. The ‘great hit’ was a failure; the ‘little something’ is still being played today. It was Trial by Jury. Its first run lasted a year and Sullivan’s brother Fred played the Learned Judge.
This one-act opera was followed by many other collaborations, among them HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers – all sacred names for Gilbert and Sullivan addicts. The two men became rich and famous, but they could not stand each other. About fifteen years after Trial by Jury they quarrelled over the price of a carpet bought by D’Oyly Carte for the Savoy Theatre (which had been built to house their work, the ‘Savoy Operas’) and the partnership broke up. But that notorious quarrel about the carpet was not about the carpet at all. It was bound to erupt, carpet or no carpet, because of the clash of personalities. The two men complemented each other in many ways, but their differences were too great for the collaboration to endure: Gilbert’s impulsive bluntness and touchiness and Sullivan’s accommodating suavity, his hatred of disagreements and his eagerness to be loved by everyone, all the time, just would not mix.
Gilbert died by drowning in his own swimming-pool, in 1911. A young woman had got into trouble in the water and he rescued her, losing his own life in the process: an act not surprising in one who could be genuinely kind and generous. But basically he was a tough and cruel man, the typical mimophant. The mimophant – a zoological wonder invented by Arthur Koestler – is a cross between the mimosa and the elephant. The mimophant is touchy like the mimosa when he is concerned; but he is as lightfooted as an elephant when it comes to others. When Gilbert was being cross-examined by Carson in a silly libel-suit he initiated (and did not win), he was asked:
Carson: ‘You don’t like reading hostile criticism?’
Gilbert: ‘I have a horror of reading criticism at all, either good or bad. I know how good I am, but I don’t know how bad I am.’
During the same cross-examination Gilbert referred to bad musical comedies.