[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
First, a little verse.
***
Mark Twain delivered this devastating comeback at a cocktail party when… or maybe it was Noel Coward. I can’t remember. It was one of those clever people back when memorable mots were bon and got traded around. If it was Churchill who said it, he would have been talking to Lady Astor. Gore Vidal or William F. Buckley? I suppose it could have been Dick Cavett, but he’s more contemporary. The jab’s too clever for anyone who was on TV and by the time Cavett made the scene, Mid-Atlantic was out of style and this is too pointed to have been said in anything but an English or Mid-Atlantic accent. Maybe it was one of those New Yorkers who wrote for the New Yorker? One of the Gertrude Steins? My friend’s great grandmother who shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart and was friends with Zoe Fitzgerald swears Lindbergh said it to Babe Ruth, but that Lindy was cribbing from something he heard Coolidge say to Chaplin.
There’s a genre of witticisms attributed to a cloud of dead eminences. “If you were my wife, I’d drink it,” “What can you hope but to be sunk in a bigger, more expensive ship,” and “In the morning I shall be sober, but you…” I’m pretty sure all of those are Churchill, but you know the flavor. I figured this was a recent phenomenon looking back on a fuzzy past, coinciding with declining standards and kids spending all their allowance on detective comics and the talkies. Know nothings like me from the age of Dumb and Dumber* hear something witty from the past through a telephone game of conversations and magazine articles, pick up bits, remember less, and are never so rude to challenge or verify chit-chat. We grapevine-didacts know, but don’t know. But it isn’t a recent phenomenon, at least not very recent.
Ninety-eight years ago, Dorothy Parker found herself a frequent victim of this cleverness attribution confusion. I’m reliably sure the following short verse is hers.
Oscar Wilde
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
Oscar Wilde was fantastic off-the-cuff. Examples range from verified—The poet Lewis Morris claimed there was a conspiracy of silence against him, to which Wilde responded, “Join it.”—to the probable—When asked about the painter James Whistler, “That he is indeed one of the very great masters of painting, is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.”—to the apocryphal—On being asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
A lot of his more famous quips are taken from his plays. “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” and “I can resist everything except temptation,” are lines from Lady Windermere’s Fan. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” comes from The Importance of Being Earnest.
Wilde was a funny guy. You’d think that would mean he had few funny poems in him. It may be that he did and it may be that he got around to putting them down on paper, but I can’t, for the life of my afternoon, find any. There’s no sign of him in the Kingsley Amis edited New Oxford Book of Light Verse; the Index of Authors flows from “Wesley, Samuel” to “Wilmot, John, see Rochester, Earl of” smoothly, no apologetic wince or defiant chin marking absence. It wouldn’t surprise me if Amis left out a much loved author because he wasn’t so impressed himself, but Wilde’s wit is British marrow. Oxbridge first years cut their teeth on detached bemusement and eyebrow lift affectation.
My partial reading of the 12th edition of Wilde’s Poems, first printed in 1878 but added to as new material was available (making posthumous editions nearly complete collections of the authors published verse) found no hilarity.
Funny was, as best I can tell, for plays and prose. His poetry is sensual, the voice often wistful, and frequently relies on classical references. Below is iambic pentameter in abab rhyme; Victorian boilerplate.
My Voice
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)Within this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts’ full pleasure—You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth’s vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
I don’t know that I mean “Victorian boilerplate” as a snub. Modern interests me more, but that only tells you about me. Victorian poetry is rigid, but as with poets from any other time, the poets were expressive. That they restrained themselves in form doesn’t mean they conveyed less or captured something inferior. I think of Clapton and Merlot. As guitarists, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix were innovators. Eric Clapton stayed within guardrails but within those self-imposed limits, he was as or more soulful. Merlot is a fickle grape. It turns dull and lactic on the valley floor and lifeless on the wrong hill or right hill in wrong weather. For all the Merlot jokes in Sideways, it’s lost that the sacred bottle in that movie was a Merlot predominant Bordeaux. Only an orthodox approach brings out the grape’s best.
The form shouldn’t mislead. Wilde was not a conventional person. This is speculation on my part, but could it be that poetry was personal in a way that prose and theater were not? His plays were performed on a stage in front of an audience, so I’ll not comment further on whether it is or isn’t extroversion. With the prose, the plays made the public persona Wilde cultivated: bemused, erudite, whip-like. An armchair critic such as myself with an afternoon invested in figuring out the whys and wherefores of a complicated man has to wonder if Wilde saw poetry as a personal release. He was witty for the world. His poetry is maudlin (pronounced Magdalen).
Late in his life, he had cause to be maudlin. The details are not so well known, but the gist is: Wilde was arrested and charged with sodomy and gross indecency, found guilty of the latter, sentenced to two years hard labor, and spent his post prison years impoverished in self imposed exile in France. While missing from Amis’s New Oxford Book of Light Verse, he is included Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. It’s only one poem, but his inclusion among the Moderns is as surprising to me as his exclusion among the Lights.
Yeats chose “The Ballad of Reading Goal,” a telling of the days leading to the execution of one of Wilde’s fellow prisoners from, presumably, Wilde’s point of view. As the title implies, it’s written in a basic ballad form, so broken fourteeners in ababab, as sullen aspiring folk lore is wont to be written.
from The Ballad of Reading Goal
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
There are faults in stress in the last two lines of both of the above stanzas. That’s not representative. On the whole the poem flows in well crafted and expected sing-song as a ballad should. I picked the flawed bits for what they describe: hard labor, bleak outlook, and resignation. There’s not a quip to be found.
Here’s one from before his legal troubles. He’s not beaten down, but restlessness and dissatisfaction wrap up a ball of defiance.
Tædium Vitæ
To stab my youth with desperate knives, to wear
This paltry age’s gaudy livery,
To let each base hand filch my treasury,
To mesh my soul within a woman’s hair,
And be mere Fortune’s lackeyed groom,—I swear
I love it not! these things are less to me
Than the thin foam that frets upon the sea,
Less than the thistledown of summer air
Which hath no seed: better to stand aloof
Far from these slanderous fools who mock my life
Knowing me not, better the lowliest roof
Fit for the meanest hind to sojourn in,
Than to go back to that hoarse cave of strife
Where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.
I chose the next poem because I liked “Tædium Vitæ,” and, since my intended column about what I presumed would be hilarious and clever Oscar Wilde poems fell apart, I reached out to any connection or segue I could find. Like “Tædium Vitæ,” “Tristitæ” is spelled with “Æ,” which I took to be the Old English letter Ash, adapted from ruins. Another poor assumption: “Æ,” in most cases when dealing with classical material, is a medieval Latin scribe’s e caudata, also known as the ae ligature. In any case, both poems have “Æ” in the titles and both traffic in ennui.
“Tristitæ” goes one further with an ae ligature in the title and an introductory quotation from Æschylus. It translates as “Sorrow, sing sorrow, but good shall prevail with power.”
Tristitæ
Αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω
O well for him who lives at ease
With garnered gold in wide domain,
Nor heeds the splashing of the rain,
The crashing down of forest trees.O well for him who ne’er hath known
The travail of the hungry years,
A father grey with grief and tears,
A mother weeping all alone.But well for him whose foot hath trod
The weary road of toil and strife,
Yet from the sorrows of his life.
Builds ladders to be nearer God.
Now, when told that Oscar Wilde was a humorous and witty writer, you can respond, “Yes, he often was.”
I’ll leave with a paragraph lifted from Wikipedia. It recalls one line dismissals in the vein of the Oscar Wilde that comes to mind when one says “Oscar Wilde,” as opposed to the one that measured syllables.
“London theatre director Luther Munday recounted some of Wilde’s typical quips: Wilde said of Whistler that ‘he had no enemies but was intensely disliked by his friends’, of Hall Caine that ‘he wrote at the top of his voice’, of Rudyard Kipling that ‘he revealed life by splendid flashes of vulgarity’, of Henry James that ‘he wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty’, and of Marion Crawford that ‘he immolated himself on the altar of local colour’.”
* Dumb and Dumber is on the list, with Titanic, Good Will Hunting, and Napoleon Dynamite, of movies people can’t believe I’ve never seen. For all I know Dumb and Dumber is Proustian, but for the clips. My apologies to fans if that is somehow the case.
