`A Kind of Latterday Dr Johnson'

John Heath-Stubbs, who died the day after Christmas at the age of 88, was only a name to me until I read a sweet remembrance of the English poet-critic by Jay Parini, the American writer and teacher. Heath-Stubbs began losing his sight in the nineteen-sixties, and was entirely blind by 1978, putting him in the company of Homer, Milton and Borges. He claimed to have accepted his loss of vision with stoic resignation, but lamented no longer being able to troll London’s second-hand book stores. Parini writes:

“ I loved going to see John, who struck me as the embodiment of English poetry, a kind of latterday Dr Johnson, with his London seediness, his erudition and his stubborn Christianity, all of which I admired.”

I regret not having known Heath-Stubbs’ work while he was alive, so I performed the truest tribute we can give a writer and took five of his books from the library. Obviously, I had missed a lot. He seems to have been a sweet-natured contrarian who prized Dryden’s definition of poetry as “articulate music.”

In The Torriano Sequences (1997), Heath-Stubbs included six poems collectively titled “Cats’ Parnassus,” each devoted to the cats (real and poetic) of six English poets, and each written in imitation of the poet’s style: Samuel Johnson’s “Hodge,” Christopher Smart’s “Jeoffrey,” Horace Walpole’s “Selima” (already immortalized by Thomas Gray in “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfish”), Edward Lear’s “Foss,” Matthew Arnold’s “Atossa,” and T.S. Eliot’s “A Jellicle Cat.” Here is “Hodge,” in Johnsonian rhyming couplets:

“Where Arts, where Sciences, their reign extend,
One truth is clear – the cat has been man’s friend.
In all the feline race – the humble tabby,
The alley Tom, with coat adust and shabby,
Cats sprung from fruitful Egypt’s nobler breed
(Honours divine were once for these decreed),
Cats whiter than the snow, cats black as night,
Cats formed to be a Persian queen’s delight,
The tailless Manx, the blue-eyed cats of Siam –
You’ll nowhere see a finer cat than I am:
Old Hodge, whom learned Johnson chose, to share
His plain commodious mansion in Gough Square.
By night I, vigilant, patrol the house,
Swift to repress each sly, invading mouse,
Who might with scrabblings mar his wonted rest,
Or in his papers build her procreant nest;
By day, while he is poring on his book,
I sleep contented, in the ingle-nook,
Till Anna Williams shall dispense the tea –
I hope there’ll be some oysters too for me.”

On a more somber note, here is “A Few Strokes on the Sand,” from Heath-Stubbs’ Collected Poems: 1943-1987:

“Old men, as they grow older, grow the more garrulous,
Drivelling temporis acta into their beards,
Argumentative, theoretical, diffuse.

“With the poet, not so. One learns
To be sparse of words; to make cold thrusts
Into the frosty air that comes.

“The final message – a few strokes on the sand;
A bird’s footprints running to take off
Into the adverse wind.”