`The Frills and Furbelows of Things'

“But, unlike us, they were not concerned wholly with the inward and spiritual side of life. They cared for the material surface, too. They were learned in the frills and furbelows of things.”

The voice is unmistakably Max Beerbohm’s. No other author calibrates his irony so finely it can be read by the unsuspecting as testimony under oath. The passage above appears in “The Decline of the Graces” in his essay collection Yet Again (1922). Four pages later I note another line that sets off a time-released laugh: “On the banner that I wave is embroidered a device of prunes and prisms.” Beerbohm borrows the final phrase from an amusing riff spoken by Mrs. General in Little Dorrit (1857):

“Father is rather vulgar, my dear . . . [He] gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company or on entering a room, `Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, prunes and prism.’”

Beerbohm’s essay is sparked by his reading of The Young Lady’s Book (1822), which is subtitled A Manuel for Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits. From his description it sounds like Regency-era Miss Manners, but what interests me is “furbelows.” From the context I took it to mean filigree, something inessential added to something else, and the OED confirms it:  “A piece of stuff pleated and puckered on a gown or petticoat; a flounce; the pleated border of a petticoat or gown. Now often in pl. as a contemptuous term for showy ornaments or trimming, esp. in a lady’s dress.” (In its charmingly pedantic way, the OED includes a later mutation of “furbelow”: “A name for Laminaria bulbosa, a seaweed with a large wrinkled frond.”)

I have the sort of mind that perceives puns where none exists. “Furbelow,” down to its precise spelling, suggests a bodily region. Rather primly, the OED makes no mention of it, unlike Vol. 1 of A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. Published by the Athlone Press in 1994, its three volumes are the work of Gordon Williams, who defines “furbelow” bluntly: “whore; vulva.” He then relates the slang term to its conventional usage: “The petticoat flounce was popularly worn by prostitutes, and attributive references are common. But it becomes a harlot-term in its own right, and provides a punning extension to the sexual parts (cf. fur).” Williams fills two-thirds of a page with citations, mostly drawn from what he calls in his introduction “the more ephemeral sources of broadside, pamphlet and newsbook.” He cites Edward Ward’s (1667-1731) Adam and Eve stript of their furbelows: or, the fashionable virtues and vices of both sexes expos’d to publick view (1715), a work Williams describes as “raffish.”

`Its Grave a Greasy Window'

I found “Old Newspaper Clipping in an Old Novel” in Michael McFee’s That Was Oasis, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012):

“It flutters to the table

but leaves behind a silhouette,

a yellowish-brown rectangle

its newsprint pressed into

the front endpapers for decades,

an inkless stain, inverse bleaching,

the author’s obituary scissored

by faithful librarian or fan

casting a shadow bookplate,

its grave a greasy window

we can’t quite see through.”

McFee’s poem sparked a memory. I own other editions and rely on them for handy pleasure and memory confirmation, but periodically I borrow Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems from the university library. The 1,018-page volume was published by MacMillan in 1929. It’s not pretty. The cover is a purplish brown but the spine is intact and the book has the dense heft of a loaf of whole-wheat bread fresh from the oven. It doubles as a reliquary or portable shrine, which is the reason I enjoy holding it. The book’s front endpaper is inscribed “Katharine Keats Braithwaite, Christmas 1929.” Pasted on the front pages are four newspaper clippings, brown and brittle but intact and legible, reporting Robinson’s death on April 6, 1935. Judging from fragments of stories and ads on the backs of the clips, they were cut from a Boston newspaper, probably the Herald. The main story, accompanied by a mug shot of Robinson, carries three headlines in a one-column format:

“EDWIN ROBINSON,

POET, DIES AT 65”

“Maine Native Thrice Won

Pulitzer Prize for

His Writing”

“FIRST WON FAME

AS N.Y. LABORER”

This is the only time I’ve seen “thrice” used in a headline. Here’s the lead of the Associated Press story: “The living ranks of the great moderns of American poetry and literature, who achieved classic fame with the turn of the century, dwindled further today with the death of Edwin Arlington Robinson.” Consider the poor rewrite man who fashioned that touchingly awkward sentence. Three paragraphs down we read:

“Only Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay are now left of the little group of ranking poets who won acclaim in the 1900’s.

“Amy Lowell and Vachel Lindsay, two others outstanding, are dead.

“They, with Robinson, first began to achieve real prominence in 1914. Harriet Monroe of Chicago, who published a magazine called `Poetry,’ early printed their works and the works of others of their contemporaries and played a large role in building up their popularity in the United States and England.”

Seldom are journalists literary scholars. Our overworked A.P. man would have cobbled together his story from earlier clips he found in the wire service morgue. There’s no mention of Pound, Eliot or the revolution they unleashed, which had the unwarranted effect of rendering Robinson, one of our finest poets, old-fashioned in the eyes of the novelty-minded. Then our nameless editor authors a sentence mingling biographical truth and critical half-cliché: “Robinson was shy, a shunner of publicity, but a poet who wrote in the simple language of the world.”

    

A little searching disclosed that Katharine Keats Braithwaite was the daughter of the poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite (1878-1962), and probably owes her unlikely middle name to him.

`That Improbable Goal'

“The poet was not quite dead.”

Sad words for a man who had another three years to live. Five years had passed since Philip Larkin had written his last indisputably great poem, “Aubade.” James Booth in Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014) tells us Larkin completed this poem, his first in three years, on this date, July 24, in 1982:

“Long lion days

Start with white haze.

By midday you meet

A hammer of heat--

Whatever was sown

Now fully grown,

Whatever conceived

Now fully leaved,

Abounding, ablaze-

O long lion days!”

A modest valediction. Perhaps an oblique, punning acknowledgment that Larkin’s own poetic gift was “Now fully leaved.” Larkin had never been afflicted with Whitman-like prolificity. His poems were perfect but few. Booth notes that of those he wrote in his final years, two were celebrations of poets (Gavin Ewart, Charles Causley) on the occasion of their sixty-fifth birthdays. “Was he,” Booth asks, “on some level, attempting to persuade himself that he might himself reach that improbable goal?” Larkin would die on Dec. 2, 1985, age sixty-three.

`Boxer's Vigilance and Poet's Rigour'

The best allusions are unannounced and kept under wraps. That eliminates the showoffs who want only to parade their learning. The second time I read Ulysses, I did so with the goal of thoroughly annotating it – a ridiculous ambition for a twenty-year-old autodidact even to contemplate. I did pretty well with Shakespeare but muffed the opera and Irish history references, among other things. Still, with subsequent readings, I filled the margins of my old black-covered Random House edition and taped in additional sheets with further annotations. Now the book is swollen and held together with rubber bands, and is less a novel than a curious artifact of my prideful youth. I’m unlikely to read Joyce’s novel again.

In 1954, Yvor Winters brought Thom Gunn to the United States and Stanford University. Gunn had graduated from Cambridge the previous year and published his first collection, Fighting Terms. He had never visited the United States. On Aug. 28, 1954, Winters writes to the young Englishman (The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, ed. R.L. Barth, 2000), welcomes him to the U.S. and invites him to come to supper when he arrives. Winters quickly chucks his formidable reputation:

“I am not a Don; I am merely a professor. My most intimate friends are Airedales, but I enjoy my poets, and during the school year I have not the time to see as much of them off the campus as I would like.”

Winters expresses sadness that Gunn’s first glimpse of the U.S. will be the Atlantic seaboard: “It is a dismal province, and you will like the west the better, I suppose, for having seen the worst the first.” Winters drily balances wit and West Coast chauvinism:

“In New Mexico and Arizona . . . the earth is red. These are good states. In California the earth is red on the western slope of the Sierras, and when you get down into the great valley, the grass will be dead and the air will be yellow. I find that I cannot endure to be far from the yellow air for very long. It is like gold to airy thinness beat, but it smells better.” 

A good allusion flatters the recipient. It’s a gift. Winters knew Gunn had read his Donne, and Gunn saw in Winters a “boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour.”   

`The Fate of Other Pretty Things'

Dr. Johnson’s most readable and rereadable book for those still reading in the twenty-first century is probably Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), containing fifty-two portraits mingling biography and criticism. Some of his renderings and judgments remain indelible. Despite the efforts of modern biographers, Swift will always have “a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear.” I first read that in 1971 and it never leaves me. The same goes for his assessment of Dryden’s work habits: His “performances were always hasty, either excited by some external occasion, or extorted by domestic necessity.” Any honest writer will understand. For Friday’s post I read Johnson’s “Life of Prior” again. Hooked, I reread his “Life of Waller” and found this field of gems:

“Genius now and then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus; and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance, which owes nothing to the subject. But compositions merely pretty have the fate of other pretty things, and are quitted in time for something useful: they are flowers fragrant and fair, but of short duration; or they are blossoms to be valued only as they foretell fruits.”

Johnson goes on to commend Waller’s “On Love,” which begins: “Anger, in hasty words or blows, / Itself discharges on our foes.” Rereading Johnson on Weller loosens a dozen memories and associations. As a young man he translated Anacreon’s Ode IX, and here is C.H. Sisson’s translation of Catullus II (The Poetry of Catullus, Viking, 1966):

“Sparrow my Lesbia likes to play with,

The one she likes to hold in her lap

To whom she gives her finger tip

To make him bite, as she likes, more sharply,

When, shining because of my desire

She finds it a precious thing to play with

(I think, when her grave fire acquiesces

She finds it a solace for her pain).

If I could play with you just as she does

I’d have a way of lightening my cares.”

Johnson’s “merely pretty” sounds an alarm. None of the writers thus far cited in this post is “merely pretty.” All, to varying degrees, are rough-hewn, plain-spoken (though eloquent) and “useful,” to use Johnson’s corrective. As to Waller, any mention of him recalls Anthony Hecht’s elegy for his friend and fellow poet, “To L.E. Sissman, 1928-1976” (The Transparent Man, 1990):

“Dear friend, whose poetry of Brooklyn flats

And poker sharps broadcasts the tin pan truths

Of all our yesterdays, speaks to our youths

In praise of both Wallers, Edmund and Fats . . .”

`His Verses Always Roll, but They Seldom Flow'

Like the Arthurian legend and Lana Turner’s discovery at Schwab’s, Matthew Prior’s public entrée to literature stirs the hopes and imaginations of all who feel they have gone unrecognized. In 1675, when Prior was eleven, he worked as a bookkeeper in his uncle Arthur Prior’s Rhenish Tavern in Westminster, London. Pepys was a patron, drinking wine by the pint, eating anchovies, gossiping and eyeing the ladies. In Matthew Prior: Poet and Diplomatist (Columbia University Press, 1939), Charles Kenneth Eves sets the scene:

“Matt from his seat behind the bar had ample opportunity to observe the free, easy manners and conversation of the patrons. Much that came out in his own life and verse afterwards is plainly traceable to the tavern, proving, said Dr. Johnson, the truth of the Horatian aphorism: `The vessel long retains the scent which it first receives’ . . . Yet it is to be questioned whether Prior’s coarseness, his love of drink, his ribaldry, are to be attributed so much to the influence of the tavern as to that of the times.”

Eves tells us Prior’s enemies in later life taunted him with such nicknames as “Matthew, the Pint Boy” and “Matthew Spindleshanks, the Tavern Boy.” Among the patrons of the Rhenish was Charles Sackville, Sixth Earl of Dorset, already the patron of Dryden and Congreve, among others. In his remembrance of the poet, Sir James Montague, who lived across the street from the tavern and remained Prior’s lifelong friend, writes:  

“[Lord Dorset] surprised this youth, Matthew Prior, with a Horace in his hand, which taking from him to see what book he had got, he asked him what he did with it. Young Matthew answered he was looking upon it. How, said Lord Dorset, do you understand Latin? He replied, a little, upon saying which the noble lord tried if he could construe a place or two, and finding he did, Lord Dorset turned to one of the odes, and bid him put it into English, which Matt did in English metre, and brought it up to the company before they broke up, and the company was so well pleased with the performance, and the address of the thing, that they all liberally rewarded him with money; and whenever that company met there, it was certainly part of their entertainment to give Odes out of Horace, and verses out of Ovid to translate.”

Prior became Lord Dorset’s protégé, enabling him to resume study at the Westminster School (Prior had been forced to drop out after his father’s death). Among the school’s distinguished alumni were Jonson, Cowley, Dryden, John Locke and Christopher Wren.

A few years later, Prior won a scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge. While there he wrote occasional poems in English and Latin, and soon became the most accomplished English poet between Dryden and Pope.

Here are two of Prior’s epigrams, a minor but pleasant form in his hands (The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, Vol. I, eds. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 1959):

“Ovid is the surest Guide,

You can name, to show the Way

To any Woman, Maid, or Bride,

Who resolves to go astray.”

And this:

“No, no; for my Virginity,

When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll dye:

Behind the Elmes, last Night, cry’d Dick,

Rose, were You not extreamly Sick?”

In his “Life of Prior,” Dr. Johnson obviously feels an affinity with the poet when he describes him as “one of those that have burst out from an obscure original to great eminence.” His assessment of Prior’s gift is fair:

“Some of his poems are written without regularity of measures, for when he commenced poet, we had not recovered from our Pindarick infatuation; but he probably lived to be convinced that the essence of verse is order and consonance. His numbers are such as mere diligence may attain; they seldom offend the ear, and seldom sooth it; they commonly want airiness, lightness, and facility; what is smooth is not soft. His verses always roll, but they seldom flow.”

Prior was born on this date, July 24, in 1664, and died on Sept. 18, 1721. Three days later, Jonathan Swift concludes the letter he is writing to William King, the Archbishop of Dublin: “I am just now told from some newspapers, that one of the king’s enemies, and my excellent friend, Mr. Prior, is dead; I pray God deliver me from many such trials. I am neither old nor philosopher enough to be indifferent at so great a loss; and therefore I abruptly conclude, but with the greatest respect, my lord.”

`The Task Is Not Very Agreeable to Me'

How do you tell a correspondent not seen in decades that you have grown old and not make it sound self-evident, self-pitying or dull? You write like William Cowper. Despite bouts of madness, Cowper as a letter writer can be dignified, playful and witty, often simultaneously. On this date, July 20, in 1780, he writes to his cousin Harriet Cowper:

“You see me sixteen years older, at the least, than when I saw you last; but the effects of time seem to have taken place rather on the outside of my head, than within it. What was brown, is become grey, but what was foolish, remains foolish still. Green fruit must rot before it ripens, if the season is such as to afford it nothing but cold winds and dark clouds, that interrupt every ray of sunshine.”

Cowper manages to sound charming while recounting incipient old age (he was fifty and would live until 1800) and a difficult life (suicide attempts, asylums). He continues writing to his cousin, who was later Lady Hesketh:

“My days steal away silently, and march on (as poor mad Lear would have made his soldiers march) as if they were shod with felt; not so silently, but that I hear them; yet were it not that I am always listening to their flight, having no infirmity that I had not, when I was much younger, I should deceive myself with an imagination that I am still young.”

Cowper alludes to the wit of another mad man, King Lear, who in Act IV, Scene 6, says “It were a delicate stratagem, to shoe / A troop of horse with felt.” Age is a ready-made, temptingly easy subject for joking, one that lends joke-making confidence even to the humorless. Cowper winningly turns the subject on himself. Abruptly he changes subject, and articulates a familiar writer’s lament:

“I am fond of writing, as an amusement, but do not always find it one. Being rather scantily furnished with subjects, that are good for anything, and corresponding only with those, who have no relish for such as are good for nothing, I often find myself reduced to the necessity, the disagreeable necessity, of writing about myself. [Not unlike contemporary poets and memoirists.] This does not mend the matter much; for though in a description of my own condition, I discover abundant materials to employ my pen upon, yet as the task is not very agreeable to me, so I am sufficiently aware, that it is likely to prove irksome to others.”

If only more writers shared Cowper’s understanding of self-as-subject. Unless your name is Montaigne, beware. The self, like dreams, is of interest only to the self in question. Cowper continues:         

“A painter, who should confine himself, in the exercise of his art, to the drawing of his own picture, must be a wonderful coxcomb, if he did not soon grow sick of his occupation, and be peculiarly fortunate, if he did not make others as sick as himself.”

This sample suggests why Cowper, after Keats, is the most touching, amusing and stylistically accomplished letter writer in English. Both men never, despite their obvious suffering, succumbed to self-pity, bitterness or lousy writing.

[Addendum on Lady Hasketh: On Jan. 10, 1781, Dr. Johnson’s friend, Hester Lynch Piozzi, writes in her diary (Thraliana, ed. Katharine Balderston, 1942): “Dear Lady Hesketh! And how like a Naples Washball [a bar of soap for bathing] She is: so round, so sweet, so plump, so polished, so red, so white . . . with more beauty than almost any body, as much Wit as many a body; and six Times the Quantity of polite Literature, Belles Lettres as we call ’em. Lady Hesketh is wholly neglected by the Men: why is that? . . . I never can find out what that Woman does to keep the people from adoring her.”]