Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage through the London Literary World

A Tragic Poem in Rhyming Couplets

To Prue

It is the wound inflicted upon our self-love, not the stain upon the character of the thoughtless offender, that calls for condign punishment. Crimes, vices may go unchecked, or unnoticed: but it is the laughing at our weaknesses, or thwarting of our humours, that is never to be forgotten. It is not the errors of others, but our own miscalculations, on which we wreak our lasting vengeance. It is ourselves that we cannot forgive.

- Hazlitt, On Will-Making

A Guide to the Characters of the London Literary World

PEREGRINE PRYKKE, a critic: author of Loose Laurels

MRS PRYKKE, his Mother

GRAHAM GROTT, a schoolteacher

F.R. LOOSELEAF, a prophet at Downing, Cambridge

CYNTHIA DEVINE, an ingénue at Girton, Cambridge

DOC STEIN, a polymath at Churchill, Cambridge

IAN HAMMERHEAD, poet, critic and editor

L. L. EL AL, poet, critic and mountaineer

SEAMUS FEAMUS, an Irish poet

MARVIN GRABB, a television personality

JELLY-ROLL BELLY, journalist, jazz singer and television personality

DOUGLAS DUNGE, a Scots poet

TED THEWS, an animalistic icon

HUGO HARSFRIED, a minimalist poet

KLAUS MAULER, editor of the Listener

JEFF NUTTCASE AND BOB JOBBING, two poets of the people

TERRY TOWELLING, literary critic of the Observer

MICHAEL KOITUS, an operator at the ICA

BRIAN GOUGH and HENRI PATTEN, a pantomime horse from Liverpool

MITCH L. ADRIAN, a revolutionary poet

CREEPING GEORGE McDEATH, poet and impresario

ANNA PEST, poet, model and vamp

THE MARCHIONESS OF PROPERLITTLE-RAYVER, a noble patroness of the Arts

BOB LULL, an American poet

JOHN BRAINWAVE, a Northern novelist

WEE GEORGIE WIDE, chairman of Tightenbelt and Buckledown, publishers

EDWARD PYGGE, a mysterious satirist

BIG JOHN GROSS, editor and man of letters

WALTER WAITER, poet and gentleman

GAVIN SUET and ALAN BROWNJUG, friends to Walter

COLIN FLUCK, poet and aesthetician

RICHARD BIERSTEIN, ale correspondent of the Guardian

JOHN FOP and JAMES FLINT, two formalist poets

DERWENT MEEK, assistant editor to Mauler

PROFESSOR 'CHRIS' RIX, a super-Don: author of Yeats and Humiliation

CHARLES OZBUNS, chairman of the State Arts Hand-out Panel

GREER GARSTLEIGH and KATE MILLBOMB, two feminists

ROCK HORRORBALL, an experimental poet

PAULINE and POOGY SCHEISSENHAUS, two sculptors

HAIKU YAMASHITA, an insane Japanese conceptual artist

THE PEKING PEOPLE'S PUPPETEERS' PLATOON, a dance troupe

THE RUBBER FREAKS FOR CUBA, another dance troupe

KINGSLEY KONG and NORMAN MOONBASE, two grand old SF buffs of the Right

TONY GODSPELL, a whizz-kid editor

BERNARD BEAVER, a music-loving journalist

WILDWIND WAGTAIL, a zany

TONY TIME, a sequential novelist

PHILIP LAWKS, a provincial poet

LORD TEDDYBEAR, the Poet Laureate

MAG SCRABBLE, novelist and broadcaster

STEPHEN SPINDLE, a venerable literary figure

FRANKI MODE, Ubiquitous Professor of English Literature

CLARA TOMAHAWK, literary editor of different magazines

N. T. THWEET, literary editor of the same magazines at different times

PHILIP PHROG, producer of Kritiks’ Kworum

LADY FREESIA FRUITCAKE, a biographer

MARGERINA LATCHKEY, a broadcaster

BRON WAN, a permanent adolescent

KID KONG, son to Kingsley: a boy novelist

HAROLD HALF-PINT, an elliptical playwright

CHIEF CLERK, an aesthete

HUGE WELSHMAN, BBC: Director-General

STANLEY STORKINS, a Northern playwright

FELICITY FARK, an innocent young actress

LORD FRUITCAKE, a humble Peer

LORD FATMAN, a sage

LORD BUTCHFIELD, photographer and motorcyclist

LORD POLAROID, a tragedian

AND MANY MORE

Book One

Because so many ask what he was like,

I sing the life and death of Master Prykke,

Whose first name, Peregrine, he shrank to Perry –

His lone and doomed endeavour to be merry.

A worthy youth, whose reasonable gravity

Was so sincere it bordered on depravity –

The kind of finely balanced moral fervour

That fills the Leader Page of the Observer –

Although I should at this point quickly add

I find the paper’s Arts Page not half bad,

Perhaps because, week in, week out, I’m in it,

And so are (they’ll be on stage in a minute)

My co-narrators of this gory story,

Which will, to Perry Prykke’s undying glory,

Retrace the apices and plumb the abysses

Of his anabasis and - well, catabasis.

We won’t go through (it’s all been done before)

The business of how, winding up the War,

The Middle Class – as ever, keen to strive –

Renewed itself in 1945

(Much pleased at having seen off sinful Jerry)

By siring many sons, including Perry:

A product of the Population Bulge

Whose Fame was foredoomed fiercely to effulge,

But who at first lay listless in his swaddling,

Indifferent to the whole idea of coddling.

It was a solemn babe, with earnest eyes:

The kind that rarely smiles yet never cries.

A shy one, even shame-faced, at the breast,

It gave, for every nappy that it messed,

A long and heartfelt semaphored apology

Betokening an insecure psychology.

Ex-colonel Prykke, with what his loins had wrought

Well pleased (he was not one for abstract thought)

Went dourly back to daily setting forth

From Audley End in the commuter’s North

To keep the same old ledgers in the City.

No room for passion there, still less for pity:

Let’s give him our ungrudging admiration

And focus on his Offspring’s education.

But then, let’s not. That territory too

Is too well ploughed by now to plough anew.

Suffice to say young Perry’s brain was graded

And deemed an organ fit to be State-aided

(With due allowance for his Father’s earnings),

Solidifying thus his Mother’s yearnings:

She dreamed of great deeds in a high arena

And saw them promised in her child’s demeanour.

By Mum spurred on, and swotting might and main,

Young Perry climbed the greasy inclined plane

Towards the next best thing to private schooling

(And near enough to set his Mother drooling) –

An Indirect Grant Semi-Public Grammar

Fee-paying Approved Labour-Camp cum Crammer

Yclept Queen Anne’s Academy, King’s Lynn.

He sat the entrance paper, and got in.

We’ll set aside his first years at the School.

He proved, by diligence, he was no fool,

Or anyway he showed he was no sluggard.

In fact he slaved away till he was buggered

(Though for the place’s sake I’m pleased to say

He was not buggered as he slaved away)

And brought back books of different shapes and sizes

The Beaks had dished out liberally as prizes

To mark his special aptitude for Writing,

At which they thought him far the most exciting

(As well as well-turned-out and soundly grounded)

High-flyer since the day Queen Anne’s was founded.

Such praise was hollow – there had been few others –

But stuff like that goes down a treat with Mothers,

And at each calf-bound presentation tome

Our Perry’s Mum lowed like a cow come home

To give its milk into a friendly pail.

Age well could wither her, and custom stale

Her light-years-less-than-infinite variety,

But nothing short of death could shake her Piety.

To graze green pastures with a Higher Breed

By proxy through her Son was all her creed,

Since no belief or dream in all Creation

Could match her faith in Transubstantiation.

But there. My tale’s five minutes under foot

(Or on foot? Under way? Which do I put?)

And here I’m standing, still the sole voice telling it.

If this keeps up I’ll soon be hoarsely yelling it –

High time that I wheeled on another witness

Beyond reproach on grounds of mental fitness

Whose views are more dispassionate than not:

It’s Perry’s English master, graham grott –

A solid, stolid Cantabridge MA

Who prays to Downing College twice a day.

Though one of F. R. Looseleaf’s also-rans

Grott featured as a Young Turk at Queen Anne’s –

The first man to detect our lad’s potential

And grasp that careful coaching was essential.

‘One can’t’,

Grott now recalls,

‘hope in the course

Of things, to find the Full Creative Force

Of Felt Thought in the as-yet unformed speech

Of those one is condemn – er, proud to teach

At Institutes of Learning such as ours.

Yet now and then a boy of special powers

Reveals himself as eager to be taught:

A boy in whom the Felt Creative Thought,

The Force of Thought, of Life Felt to the Full . . .’

I ought to warn you that this kind of bull

Was taken down verbatim as dictation

By generation after generation

Of listeners to F. R. Looseleaf’s preachings,

Who rated them above the Talmud’s teachings

As distillations of the True and Serious.

By chanting them, the dull became delirious,

Attaining just as ice cold an hysteria

As anything that goes on in Siberia,

Then fell back in a self-obsessed Satori –

But more of that anon. On with the story.

By now Grott’s run the gamut of abstraction

And might say something pertinent to the action.

‘Though not yet free of juvenile frivolities,

His class-work had those Life-Enhancing Qualities –

Felt, Life-Affirming, Reverent of Reality,

Without, I needn’t add, Sentimentality –

Which show that one is For Life, not Against it . . .’

This man’s a total idiot, you’ve sensed it:

For who except a kamikaze pilot

(i.e. one trained from childhood to revile it)

Can look on life in any other way?

‘And so I called him to my room one day

To offer – Come in! – an attentive ear

Should he have doubts concerning his Career.’

‘Gosh, Sir, I’m sorry in my thing on Pope

I got Metathesis mixed up with Trope,’

Whined Perry,

‘Unforgiveable, I know . . .’

‘No, no, Prykke,’

countered Grott,

‘don’t tremble so.

I called you here for quite another thing:

To take you, as it were, beneath my wing

And tell you what to look for, what to fear,

When Cambridge welcomes you this coming year.’

‘Gosh,’

Perry cried,

‘it’s certain, do you think?’

‘As sure as keen men rise and slack men sink

You shall go up to Sydney Selwyn College.

But Wisdom,’

Added Grott,

‘is more than Knowledge.

You have to be For Life and not Against . . .’

(The dialogue from here on I’ve condensed.)

‘. . . And pay attention always to one man;

A man the like of whom, since Time began,

Has not been seen; a man Misrepresented,

But whose Achievement can’t be circumvented

By such sophisticated forms of treason

As cleverness or wit or common reason.

The prophet F. R. Looseleaf’s who I mean:

My hero and, I hope, yours, Peregrine.’

‘Gosh, yes!’

squeaked Prykke,

‘I’ve read The Great Pursuit

And not a word of it could I refute.

I’m staggered by the potent observations

That crowd the pages of Regurgitations.

Life’s Full Creative Force is what he’s for . . .’

They drivelled on for half an hour or more

While Grott got through a fair-sized cask of sherry –

And even slipped a glass or two to Perry.

‘Good (gosh) bye, Shir, and thanksh for all you’ve done.’

‘Good luck,’

gruffed Grott, as if to his own son:

His final words of interest to the plot,

So let’s say goodbye too to Graham Grott

And send him off to sort out wigs and noses

For further dialogues and daring poses

Suggesting divers well-known personalities

At different times in various localities –

A pluralist approach whose guiding factor’s

The fact that we could not afford more actors.

Book Two

But anyway, to Cambridge. Revelation!

Completely beyond every expectation

Revolved in Perry Prykke’s most fevered dreams.

The place reduced his Mum to muted screams

And tears of joy when she, her Consort driving,

At last attained the Canaan of her striving

And parked her son with those picked to inherit

The Earth or else to win it by sheer merit –

A gang of pampered kids and brash young hustlers

Who talk one tongue, like cattle-kings and rustlers.

But Peregrine paid no heed to such things:

Instead, his narrow soul grew narrow wings.

His fund of verve might well have been exiguous

But still his revelry was unambiguous.

Though no one yet had taught him to drink deep

He stumbled as if stunned or half asleep.

He hardly spent a single moment sober

That frost-cold and crystalline October,

But cycled dazedly ‘twixt Hall and Lecture

Intoxicated by the architecture

And how the trees extended brittle glass

Unleaving limbs above the fog-soaked grass

(As lustrous as a cat-skin from Siam)

That joined the Colleges and lined the Cam,

Beneath whose icy surface lay concealed,

Like tools of war beneath a battlefield,

Corroded bike-frames, clapped out batsman’s boxes

And one or two cadavers of drowned coxes

Tossed in with hearty laughter at Bump Suppers

Or else some other orgy, e.g. Cuppers.

The rank, the razzmatazz, the rigmarole!

Right from the start Prykke swallowed that stuff whole.

He loved his little gown and wore it always.

It followed him through cloister-courts and hallways.

He wore his gown to town and to the toilet,

And if he chanced to soil it he would boil it.

On application long if in mind meagre,

Our Freshman was as pure of heart and eager

As any trainee monk in ancient Lhasa.

You never saw a tabula more rasa.

The first great influence to be impressed

Upon this bland, receptive palimpsest

Was one as drastic as it was dramatic:

It left our Perry limp and yet ecstatic.

Who else but F. R. Looseleaf, outlaw don,

Proud put-upon lay priest and paragon?

Young Perry Prykke found Looseleaf’s merest seminar

As shattering as gin and bitter lemon are

To someone in the grip of hepatitis,

Or volleyball to people with arthritis.

This man had grandeur. Gritty, grim, persuasive,

Irascible, inflexible, abrasive,

He faced four-square his foes on every side

And told them what Canute once told the tide.

‘We see that, far from evil or Satanic,

The Force of Life in Lawrence is Organic.

I needn’t add,’

he added,

‘that for Lawrence,

The Sex theme is no matter for abhorrence

As Snow or Annan might be apt to think,

But something more akin to meat and drink.

Against their cheap ideas of what’s Enlightening

Lawrentian Desire might well seem frightening.

For what else is his fruitfulness, of course,

But Felt Life in its Full Creative Force?’

To malleable Perry this was caviar.

Now this, he thought, is what concern and savvy are.

At Looseleaf’s lectures Prykke would sit and scribble

The whole kaboodle down without a quibble,

Then talk it over afterwards with one

Who’d done precisely that which he had done:

A comely girl called Cynthia Devine.

Ah, would the powers of Mendelssohn were mine!

For I would write down now a row of notes,

Which notes, when played, would, as a bubble floats,

Waft perfect pictures of her to your eye –

Or do I mean your ear? A saint would cry

To think that he must spend his life without her.

Fair Cynthia had something sweet about her.

God knows I’m less than willing to digress.

The thought already puts me in distress

That Perry, if I ramble at this rate

Will never even get to graduate.

But still I’m bound – and just to be judicious,

No more than that – to say she was delicious.

Her eyes were tubs of liquid innocence

Devoid of guile, deprived of all defence;

Her nose was built and bobbed by Pisanello

Or some equivalent Renaissance fellow;

Her skin, peach yoghurt, bloomed against the air,

Contested in food-value by her hair –

A crowning glory falling like the night

To kiss her waistline, which was very slight.

Extremities below were brief but neat.

Her skirt was plaid, and fastened at the pleat

By means of a symbolic safety-pin –

Thin armour for the charms that lay within.

Above, her tiny booblets swam before her

Like desperate hamsters drowning in angora . . .

But there, my whole description has been physical.

I fear I’ve missed her aura, which was quizzical.

When Cynthia Devine looked at the World

Her mouth was open and her toes were curled

For sheer anticipation of its yielding

The secrets it had spent her lifetime shielding.

She was a question mark, a walking query,

A pint-sized Amundsen or Admiral Peary.

Sweet Cynth was all For Life, For Creativity:

And Perry – well, he shared the same proclivity.

And so, coeval like the Sol and Gel

Whose two simplicities make up a Cell,

These youngsters were as one in their propensities:

Untutored spirits fused by twin intensities.

Together in the Stacks, the twain would garner

Apt quotes for essays about Silas Marner,

Or hand-in-hand make notes on Sons and Lovers

Until that tattered Penguin lost its covers.

Behind a sported Oak in early May

They sat to read, and then, one day, they lay.

‘For Life and not Against it!’

the lad cried.

‘For Life!’

she moaned, recumbent by his side.

The tender warmth was too much for our Perry:

He lost his head, and Cynthia her cherry.

Let’s leave them to their bliss, in blossom-fall,

When Cambridge lawns adopt a muslin shawl;

When bluebells choking daisies in the meadows

Run crazier than Thomas Lovell Beddoes,

And Callowness takes up the alto sax;

When punts can barely move along the Backs

And pretty backs are bare inside the punts.

For even in Elysium, just once

Does First Love come, like mumps or German measles –

And meanwhile, with a mighty roar of diesels,

Somebody was arriving at the Station

To whom we should devote our concentration.

His name was broadcast by a neon sign

On top of his top hat. It said Doc Stein.

A placard on his back asked, ‘Tired? Tense?’

And answered, ‘Take my Culture cure. Ten cents.’

His frock coat was stuffed full of fluent speeches

Stuffed full in turn with such unusual features

As tags in every tongue, alive and dead:

Trinitro-Ruritanian, Infra-Red,

Low-Temperature Etruscan, Serb, Seismography,

Deoxyribose, X-ray Crystallography,

The signs a cockroach makes to greet its mother

And Barthes and Lévi-Strauss to greet each other.

‘The Lapse,’

spake Stein,

‘of Culture in the West

We know to be (a spectroscopic test

Was carried out last week at MIT,

By seven leading brains including me)

A function of Verbality’s decay.

If Culture-Norms subsist in what we say,

Our Complex Sentences, like strings of genes –

Those Blueprints which themselves become Machines –

Contain the Codes for Structures of Cognition.

It Is No Accident that the attrition

Of our Linguistic Formulae takes place

Within the context of a Fall from Grace

By all that Europe’s Thinkers have erected.

The preconceptions Heidegger rejected

Were taken up by Max Planck, Edward Teller,

Hans Keller, Alfred Deller, Uri Geller . . .’

Doc Stein could keep it up like that for ages

And gently raise the stakes by easy stages

Until his ravished audience (ah, Youth!)

Were utterly convinced he told the Truth.

While winding up towards his grand finale

He ranted and waxed goggle-eyed like Dali.

While speaking what might well have been Illyrian

He blasted off in flames for the Empyrean.

‘The longings represented by Karl Kraus

We know to have recurred in Mickey Mouse!

Krafft-Ebing, Kundt and Kitasato shared

A pH number times B-flat all squared!

The pulsing Neutron Star is nothing less,

It may well be, than just a game of Chess

At which, perhaps, a dog can beat a Don

By humming Tosca through a cyclotron!

We do not know! We only know that Violence

Has finally reduced our speech to Silence!

Dumbfounded, we are waiting for a Sign!

All tongues are still! Except, of course, for mine!’

Bedazzled, Perry raced away to plant a

Review of what he’d just sat through in Granta –

Of which he had become, by sheer hard graft,

The engine, the propeller and the shaft.

His admiration now was all for Stein,

But Looseleaf quickly got him back in line.

‘We see in Stein, prolixly ineffectual,

The typical New Statesman intellectual.

His shallow cosmopolitan loquacity

(Both aiding and abetting that mendacity

The foolish take to be what’s cultivated)

Is just what D. H. Lawrence always hated:

That Lawrence who, himself supremely apt

For penetrating cultures yet untapped

By arid, quantifying sociologists,

Perceived instinctively that all apologists

For Learning in the abstract – cold induction –

Were ipso facto agents of destruction.

I don’t think I need to add, I think you know,

That Stein has taken cocktails with Lord Snow

And has been heard – he’s proud of it! – to plan an

Encroachment against Values with Lord Annan.’

Since Perry believed everything he heard

He fell for this, too, every single word,

And modified his writings in the light of it

By saying both these pundits had the right of it.

Nor did his handy knack of seeing double

At this stage get him into any trouble,

Because a point of pride with every Don

Is not to know a thing of what goes on

In Student Life, and hold it in derision –

A system known as Personal Supervision.

‘The locus of our Structure perhaps maps

Lawrentian Verbality’s collapse,’

Wrote Perry Prykke, agog with more ideas

(Exactly two) than he had had in years,

‘We do not know the cube of the square root

Because organic languages are mute.’

The plodding yet prolific literatus

Puffed up with intellectual afflatus;

The lover of the cutest girl in Girton

(Which put him on a par with Richard Burton,

Since Cambridge birds are very hard to get);

Brave Perry was without a doubt all set

To start out on a glorious career

Of telling people what they longed to hear.

For Prykke was pliant in the first degree –

Which quicker spirits could already see,

And soon the Tripos papers made it clearer.

The Dons, half cut as usual on Madeira,

In lonely rooms gave pencilled approbation

To Perry’s faithful recapitulation

Of what each one had taught as the True Creed.

The awkward fact that Prykke also agreed

With everybody else, they didn’t spot.

And so a First Degree was what he got.

Hail Graduation Day! O time of times!

When Great St Mary’s showers down her chimes

On those who throng the lawn of Regent House

To be at last rewarded. Not for nous,

But for their luck in having caught the bus

That runs express from the Eleven Plus,

Careering past those poor souls in the Poly –

Or else for simply having had the lolly.

Starred First? A Third? Who cares? You’re still BA!

Yes, everybody gets a prize today!

Great bleating herds of woolly graduands

In joky hats and white bow ties and bands!

And somewhere in the middle, the grave Perry

Attends his Cynthia like an equerry.

And now we see, in search of him, his Mum,

Who’s just arrived, and, far from stricken dumb,

She’s raving with delight at all this pap.

And now she’s caught a glimpse of Perry’s cap!

‘It’s got a little tassle!’

With a howl

She sinks into that sea of robe and cowl,

And lying on the grass enjoys full measure

The culmination of erotic pleasure –

A sight on which the Dons turn anxious eyes

But fail, I needn’t add, to recognize.

Let’s leave her there and listen to her clever

Descendant pledge his fealty forever.

‘Gosh, Cynth, I wish I didn’t have to leave.’

‘Ah, Heathcliff, dearest darling, do not grieve.’

For Cynth was staying on to do Research

On where the Brontës used to sit in church.

Did all the sisters squeeze into one pew?

If Branwell came they must have needed two.

Her thesis really would be most exciting –

And three or even four years in the writing.

‘Please promise, Heathcliff, as you value me

That you will be For Life, as I’m for thee.’

‘For Life,’

he vowed, but Life is a long time

For young men scarcely even in their prime:

A fact to which my reference must be glancing –

The plot is in a fret to be advancing.

That Perry Prykke had not put in in vain

His precious time on Granta was now plain.

The waves of tempting offers never halted

To ply his pen in papers more exalted.

But of those London-postmarked exhortations

It was the briefest gave him fibrillations –

Just such a note’s been known to give far hardier

Recipients than Perry tachycardia.

‘Please see me when you come to town,’ it said.

The signature read Ian Hammerhead.

The famous editor they called the 00

.7 Bond of literary Soho!

The TLS’s frozen-eyed Enforcer

Who thought that poetry went wrong with Chaucer!

For Perry not to heed that fearsome call

Would mean to gamble nothing, yet lose all.

(He wanted, with his Destiny ahead of him,

Nobody else enjoying it instead of him.)

The gage was down, the battle-flag unfurled!

The prize? The London Literary World!

And so Prykke left the Varsity behind,

Full certain, in what served him for a mind,

That somewhere Southward, far beyond the Fen,

His Fate awaited him, in the Great Wen.

Book Three

Now Hammerhead infests, as all know well,

A pub in Greek Street called the Gates of Hell,

And thither Perry bent his guileless step,

Astonished (while pretending to be hep)

At all the true-to-life fold-out displays

Of Doxies in the doors and alleyways

Extending him an open invitation

To some form, he assumed, of Penetration –

Though other variations of seduction

Appeared to put the emphasis on Suction.

He reached the Gates of Hell shocked to the core,

Breathed in, breathed out, and pushed the double door.

Good Heavens! Were this mob of odds and sods

His fondly cherished Literary gods?

Huge Irish navvies lounged about befuddled

Or else in softly spoken groups sat huddled

Preoccupied with clocks and bits of fuse –

It seemed a strange Headquarters for the Muse.

Blue clouds of cigarette smoke surged and plumed,

Then suddenly from out of them there loomed

The stony countenance of Hammerhead.

‘You’ve taken your time getting here,’

it said.

‘Expect you’d like to write for the Review.

You might just do it, in a year or two.

But as for now, I’ll have to dash your hopes.

You look like you might need to learn the ropes.

The first great principle you’ll have to watch

Is, I take bitter with my double scotch.’

‘Gosh, Sir,’

cringed Prykke,

‘I’m sorry to be rude:

It’s just that, as you see, I’m not too clued

Er, up, as yet, on Literary ways.

I must look like I’m in some sort of daze.’

‘There isn’t any need to call me “Sir”

Or anything like that. I much prefer

To be addressed as Chief, or Number One.

But anyway, to business. We’ve begun

With our First Law. The Second’s just as sound:

It’s Nearly Always Time For The Next Round.’

‘Gosh, Sir – er, Chief – I must apologize . . .’

‘Forget about it, kid. I sympathize.

Hell, everyone in this dodge starts off raw:

It’s just that some are less so, others more.

Now keep your lip well buttoned while I speak.

At least a hundred Novels every week

Engulf the TLS and must be judged –

A Herculean task that can’t be fudged.

I need a writer with your fresh young style . . .’

(As well, he didn’t say, as your dumb smile)

‘ . . . to grapple with this Sisyphean job.’

‘Gosh, Number One,’

said Perry with a sob

Of gratitude, while sinking to his knees.

‘You’ll find that I’m an easy man to please,’

Said Hammerhead, his eyelids thin with scorn.

‘Just take this pile of Fiction and don’t fawn:

I’m more than happy if you merely grovel.

The one on top’s the new Mag Scrabble novel.

It’s all about two sisters who write books.

One’s gifted, and the other’s got no looks.

Lead off with that. With any luck, you’ll hate it.

In which case don’t be reticent – berate it.’

With Hammerhead beside him (a black Nemesis

Exhaustively familiar with the premises),

Our Perry (by now smashed out of his mind)

Was thereupon led off like Samson blind

To meet – or if not that, at least palpate –

The Great Names lying hazily in wait

Like fabled dreadnoughts in the Jutland fog.

As damply frog-encrusted as King Log

They hulked towards him from the gloom crepuscular.

This one, for instance – hirsute, squat and muscular –

Was Hammerhead’s most formidable pal:

The poet-mountaineer, L. L. El Al.

El Al, although he scarcely scraped the sky,

Looked any man directly in the eye,

No matter if the man were James Arness.

The secret? It lay in his mode of dress.

Equipped with crampons, coils of nylon rope

And ever-ready ice-axe, he could cope

By night or day with climbing from your base

To plant his gallant flag in your North Face –

A prelude to deploying his capacity

For unrestrained rhetorical pugnacity,

Selecting verbs according to velocity

And nouns for scatological ferocity.

To Prykke, the prick of pitons in his chest,

Plus painful pick-axe prongs poked through his vest,

Spelt finis to his savoir faire. He froze –

With El Al’s famous beard stuck up his nose.

‘Now hear me good. The big trick of this game,’

El Al announced,

‘is Build Yourself A Name.

And when you do, don’t fritter it away:

Just screw the bums a century a day

For anything you write up, no matter what.

Like, Late Night Line-Up? Forty quid a shot:

Plus helicopter fare, another fifty.

A hundred for the evening if you’re nifty.

So far this year – that’s Fiscal ’68 –

I’ve earned five thou a quarter, steady rate.

My agent’s agent sets the tax aside

For when I write my book on Suicide –

A treatise on the Artist’s Alienation

In Business-Oriented Civilization.’

The next to bulk Dantesquely from the mist

Was Hammerhead’s death-dealing Satirist,

The man who made the hits for Mr Big:

Prykke caught his breath, for this was Edward Pygge –

Laconic in trench coat and felt fedora

Like Dana Andrews dreaming about Laura.

The poet, Walter Waiter shook Prykke’s hand.

Wise Walter’s cross it was to understand

The motives of all men. He thereby earned

A brand that fiercely festered, foully burned:

The fell renown of being a Nice Guy.

(The chump had never even learned to lie.)

Against him leaned the gentle Gavin Suet,

As finely lined and wind-tanned as James Stewart.

Below them Alan Brownjug, looking up,

Was catching all their spilled beer in a cup.

And here was Colin Fluck, the Aesthetician,

Profoundly silent in the Stork Position:

A witness for the creed that Art is Life –

Which is absurd, like saying Man is Wife.

And there was Big John Gross, the Man of Learning,

Who kept his massive mental motor turning

By feeding it some colourless, Slavonic

Extractive lightly qualified with tonic.

To go away, or else to stay behind?

Big John could never quite make up his mind

On that or any point, and kept contriving

To half depart while only half arriving.

And there was Richard Bierstein, rich in jest –

Whose task it is empirically to test

The thousand different kinds and strengths of ale

Great Britain’s countless pubs have got on sale.

(The job’s like tasting wine, except much greater

Amounts are swallowed and you get home later.)

Prykke gazed in speechless fright as Bierstein drank,

Rolled over like the Bismarck, heaved and sank –

A spout of steaming bubbles and low moans

Revealing where he’d gone to Davy Jones.

Lost in the fumes, heads intermingled hairily.

Lost in the hair, unsmiling eyes watched warily.

These were the Belfast poets – all called Seamus –

Of whom the leading light was Seamus Feamus,

Who even now attacked his midday meal:

Two slabs of peat around a conger eel.

‘White spoors of cockle,’

Feamus mumbled,

‘plumb

Tight mounds brine-splashed with goat-frost. Futtled, numb,

I slop the dunt melt of the scurfing bog’s

Black molars to the shred-hung mandrake. Dogs

Like spirochetes torment my afterbirth . . .’

Warmed by the joke, his cronies quaked with mirth.

And there the dandy formalist John Fop

(Whose clothes leave Kojak looking like a cop)

Stood talking shop with Trotskyite James Flint

(Who like a Conrad Outcast looked clean skint –

For though Flint had, as Fop had, a white suit on,

Flint’s looked like it belonged to Robert Newton.)

And this smooth-looking lad was Marvin Grabb,

Who seemed a drowsy victim of Queen Mab,

But was in fact the televisual host

Of shows that sliced the Arts like buttered toast

And served them up bedecked with marmalade –

Throughout which blithe proceedings he displayed

A bonhomie tenacious as alfalfa.

He marked the Works of Art all out of alpha,

Bestowing many pluses and few minuses

Through perfect teeth, though less than perfect sinuses.

And still they came, like damned souls to the Styx,

Aflicker like short candles with long wicks,

Aflutter like the air above hot streets –

Tomorrow’s Byron and the latest Keats,

The future Browning and the brand new Shelley,

And Jelly Roll (‘Just Call Me Jelly’) Belly!

Of Belly Prykke had never seen the likes:

He stared at him as Twist stared at Bill Sikes.

For Belly was an avatar, a magus,

A blazing apparition like Las Vegas.

His suit was made from twenty different leathers,

His coat from forty different kinds of feathers.

Around his stetson ran a clockwork train.

He sang and danced as if he were in pain.

‘Oh Perry, baby, welcome to the band!

I’d like to shake your lily-white wet hand!

You’ve got the kind of walnut-shell rear end

I once was prone to look for in a friend!

‘That’s prone, you get me? Yeah, and supine too.

But when they made it legal, I was through.

The Gay Scene nowadays is just for hicks.

The current trend is – get your kicks with chicks!

‘I taught Dick Jiggle how to strut his stuff.

Man, when I learned the trade, the trade was rough!

To get the world of Showbiz by the Nuts

The thing you gotta have’s a lotta guts.

‘So stick with Uncle Jelly, Perry lad!

The Know-Alls laughed when I went out with Trad.

But this time round I’ve really struck it rich.

I stuck it out and came back in with Kitsch!’

On neon platform shoes whose Perspex heels

Had mice inside them running round in wheels,

Exuding charismatic amps and watts

Fat Belly set a course for Ronnie Scot’s,

While Perry tottered onward through the gunge

To meet the Scottish poet Douglas Dunge.

A moralizing bard of wide remark –

And Hugo Harsfield lunged out of the dark.

Of these we will hear further, by-and-by.

But now a dozey glaze was in Prykke’s eye:

He ordered drinks all round and signed the cheque,

Coughed, crumpled at the midriff, hit the deck

And went to sleep in mingled pain and bliss

To dream of fickle Fame, her flagrant kiss.

Book Four

As Autumn darkness deepened in the City

The Novelists kept at it without pity.

Poor Perry toiled away as a Reviewer

And felt as if he drowned in horse manure.

His miniscule bedsit in Notting Hill

Grew insulated from the Winter chill

With brightly wrappered volumes beyond numbering,

While in amongst them Peregrine sat slumbering

Or else rapt in the life-consuming craft

Of shifting the new books before him aft

By reading them and typing up his thoughts –

An endless fusillade of short reports.

He hedged his praise, he modified his blame,

And wondered how he’d ever Make His Name:

However could one hope to be autonomous

While labouring so hard to stay anonymous?

(For in those days you might just bring to mind,

The TLS reviews were all unsigned:

Which meant that clapped-out hack and clueless tyro

Could each drag down a few bob with a biro

And academics knife each other politely –

So long as no one ventured to write brightly.)

Imagine, then, Prykke’s joy when a commanding

Soft crackle from the phone out on the landing

Subpoenaed him to Langham Place. The caller?

The Kingpin of the Listener, Klaus Mauler!

Despite his name, Klaus Mauler was a Scot.

Of Scots in London Life, there are a lot;

And Welsh, and Ulstermen, and, yes, Australians,

Hungarians, Bavarians, Westphalians,

Tanned types called Popadom and Papadopoulos –

There’s everyone except the native populace.

But that’s another subject in itself,

So for the nonce we’ll leave it on the shelf

And stick with this one dominant Big Brother –

Who seemed to Peregrine much like his Mother,

Though looking even more robustly built.

A purist, Klaus wore naught beneath his kilt

Except a knobbly stick to beat his staff with

As well as separate the wheat from chaff with

Among his crew of academic hacks,

Who bore, upon their shoulders, shins and backs,

The marks of his Olympian disfavour

Delivered like a forehand from Rod Laver.

‘I’ve seen your writings in the TLS:

They’re undergraduate pretentiousness,’

Drawled Mauler from behind a massive desk –

And Perry’s bowel performed an arabesque.

‘I won’t stand for your puerile mewlings here.

I’m not as tolerant as I appear.

I’m offering you a golden opportunity

To pull your tiny weight in this community

By covering the Literary Scene.

It doesn’t matter too much that you’re green

So long as you can spell and use good grammar.

But if you can’t, I’ll see you get the hammer

They way your predecessors did, the turds.

Your fee will be one pound a thousand words.’

‘Er, gosh, Sir, are you sure you mean a pound?’

‘Good God no, Prykke, my mind must be unsound.

I meant to tell you seventeen and six.

The larger sum is for Professor Rix –

Who earns the bonus for his seniority

And lively air of erudite Authority.

It will be years before you reach the station

Of him who wrote Yeats and Humiliation.

Till you’ve a book to challenge that great Don with

The smaller sum is plenty to go on with.’

Proud Prykke was overjoyed, for, as you know,

At that time, which was several years ago,

You still bent over if you dropped a shilling.

And think of the prestige! Was Perry willing?

You bet your life he was! And just that night

The Soho bards were scheduled to recite

Their poems at a Show in Bedford Square.

The Book Binge it was called. They’d all be there –

Dunge, Fop, Fluck, Harsfried, Hammerhead, the lot!

Just think what Cynth would say, or Graham Grott!

Ah, Creativity, the mystic riddle of it!

And Perry would be slap bang in the middle of it!

From Mauler’s office Perry walked on air

And down the corridor towards the stair,

But as he passed a doorway his sweet dreams

Were put to flight by sudden piercing screams.

He poked his head inside and gagged with shock.

A man was stretched across a whipping-block

While Mauler’s cruel shillelagh rose and fell

Like some sadistic metronome in Hell!

As knotted shoulders writhed beneath the knouting

Prykke recognized the face that did the shouting.

Those spectacles, that plumply curving cheek,

Belonged to Mauler’s sidekick, Derwent Meek!

The yells went on. Prykke’s flabbergasted jaw

Yawned like a Right Whale’s plankton-straining maw.

He’d heard that Mauler gave Meek a rough ride,

But this came close to being homicide:

The Inquisition under Torquemada

Could not have put the screws on any harder.

Prykke gumshoed off unsteady on his legs,

His First Class brain reduced to scrambled eggs,

But calmed himself by sensibly recalling

The voluntary aspect of Meek’s Mauling.

For such assaults, Prykke knew, Meek tolerated

In hopes that he would one day be instated

At Mauler’s desk as undisputed Editor.

The helpless prey was just another predator!

And as for Mauler, Chief of Secret Police –

Tous les grands homes ont toujours du caprice.

Book Five

The Book Binge galvanized the Bloomsbury night

With booming drums and waterfalls of light,

With sawdust, fairy floss and mirror-halls

And wooden clowns who swallow ping-pong balls.

A hubble-bubble Babel-Bacchanal,

A bal-masqué like Schumann’s Carnaval,

The Book Binge was a three-ring Wing-a-Ding,

A Gutenberg-Galactic Happening –

A glowing Pleasure Garden out of Bosch

On which Prykke’s only comment could be

‘Gosh’.

For here were dodgem cars, with Authors driving;

And next to them a pool with dolphins diving;

And here were tests of strength, and bells were ringing;

And further on was ‘Jelly’ Belly singing.

What games! What pipes and timbrels! What a bash!

And – here’s the best bit – all of it was gash!

A dish-fit-for-a-king done to a turn,

The thing was Subsidized from stem to stern!

Charles Ozburns of the State Arts Hand-out Panel

Had hatched the notion in his Proper Channel

In order that the Literary cliques

Who all year long intrigue and play no-speaks

Should reconcile their various activities

In one enormous outburst of Festivities.

While strident barkers bruited the attractions

Of all the different gangs, cabals and factions –

Mild Mandarins and manic Agitproppers,

Frail Struldbrugs and frenetic Teenyboppers,

Crazed New Departurists and crisp Grammarians,

Wet Apollonians and wild Aquarians –

The public flowed between the rows of tents

From Thence to Whence and Hence again to Thence.

‘Neath fizzing naphtha flares, ‘midst hoot of tooters,

The mob. vulg. milled around like bands of looters.

They jammed a booth to hear some bard recite.

The emptied it again to gain respite.

They crammed the Helter-Skelter to its summit

And rode the Roller Coaster like a plummet.

And here a row of Slave-girl Novelists,

Bejewelled and chained together at the wrists,

Were belly-dancing high above the rabble –

And prominent among them was Mag Scrabble.

Her swerving navel plugged with a carnelian

She rippled like the skin of a chameleon

Compelled to crawl across a length of tartan –

The sight would have aroused lust in a Spartan.

The target for a dozen camera crews,

Tall on a gilded rostrum stood Ted Thews.

Impressively he read rhymed tales of woe

About some kind of psychopathic crow.

‘Crow eats my eyeballs and spits out the pips.

Crow pecks my nose off and rips off my lips.

I like it, but I must say my face falls

When Crow declares an interest in my . . .’ Calls

Of ‘Genius!’ went up from every side

And all agreed Thews should be deified,

For anyone who looked like saying no

The poet’s sister flattened with one blow.

And here with muscles like the Tyrant Gessler’s

That pair of Liberated Women Wrestlers

Greer Garstleigh and Kate Millsbomb wrenched like plumbers

The necks and knees and elbows of all comers –

Their victims lay around on the tatami

Karate-chopped like slices of salami.

The atmosphere was carefree, even feckless,

But in one tent the tone was far less reckless:

For there sat the admirers, fit though few,

Of Hammerhead’s grim crew from the Review.

The aspect of the first bard to address them

Could scarcely fail to heavily impress them:

Frail Hugo Harsfried, Minimalist Poet!

His flaxen hair, as long as care could grow it,

Gleamed lustrously as Jennifer O’Neill’s,

And all the rest of him, from head to heels,

Bespoke a hypersensitive fragility

Extended to a willowy ductility –

A grail-pale male Madonna by Rossetti

As slender as a lightweight Olivetti.

‘I touch your skin. You look at me askance.

We’re lying sideways on, as if in France.

Hot talent stains my cortex like graffiti.

We’re floating upside down. We’re in Tahiti.’

This poem, first of fifteen of its kind,

Outstandingly evinced, to Perry’s mind,

Both Lyric Force and Technical Austerity.

What else did that add up to but Sincerity?

A photon-stream incisive as a razor,

The Harsfield Lyricism was a laser,

A source of light the night could not expunge.

And then he passed the torch to Douglas Dunge.

‘Wa hae the noo, ye ken? Och aye, ye’ll nae

McComprehend a mickle word I say.

I could na’ give a bugger for a’ that.

I dinna’ hae the time for social chat.

Och, if ye canna’ listen, ye can look.

Ye should hae gone and bought the bluidy book.’

Admired by all and understood by none

Dour Dunge kept going like a Gatling Gun

With infinite supplies of ammunition,

Or else a power station fired by fission.

He would have read until the Sun went Nova.

He could have maundered on till Hell froze over.

But suddenly his drone went dead as mutton

As if some giant hand had pushed a button.

The Headline Act was restless in the wings.

The time had long since come for bigger things.

Dismissing Dunge with ill-concealed rage

Hunched Hammerhead in person took the stage.

‘I kick you in the ankle,’

he read grimly,

Looked up, looked down again, and added,

‘Dimly . . . ‘

His gritted voice was more intense than loud.

‘ . . . I see you limp away into the crowd.’

At this point there took place a lengthy pause

For which, it soon turned out, there was good cause:

A hard-won truth should not be lightly said.

‘It’s time to stop pretending we aren’t dead.’

And that was the whole poem. It was plenty.

One little lyric did the work of twenty.

He looked into the audience, defying

The women in it not to burst out crying

With mingled fear and gratitude. Their eyes

Were full of tears, their breasts of heaving sighs,

A few rows from the back, some stricken mite

Expired with passion and dropped out of sight.

Her wrists were chafed, her corpse was carried off,

But no one present dared so much as cough,

For Hammerhead was slackening his jaw

A millimeter. That meant there was more.

‘The last rose petal left broke off and fluttered

To settle softly on your knee,’

He muttered.

He paused and cast his hard glance round a room

Devoid of sound as Tutankhamun’s tomb.

‘Somewhere in Luxembourg, a lorry crashed.’

The next line flew for years before it smashed

As hard as a harpoon into a seal.

‘Those knickers you were wearing looked like steel.’

The audience erupted in a standing

Ovation sounding like the Concorde landing.

To say that Perry Prykke, applauding wildly,

Had been impressed would be to put it mildly –

Since had not these three poets demonstrated

The truth of what Doc Stein had always stated?

For here was Language Tending Towards Zero!

The Poet as the Enigmatic Hero!

‘Gosh,’

Perry sighed, composing in his noodle

A fine old pot-pourri of flip flapdoodle

Concerning the forthcoming Moratorium

When poetry would be as rare as Thorium.

To change the mood, Jeff Nuttcase and Bob Jobbing –

Came storming in, blind drunk from apple-bobbing –

Their fruit-caked hair and cider-soaked apparel

Suggesting they had half drowned in the barrel.

Their selfless task to represent the legions

Of Mute Inglorious Miltons in the Regions,

They lashed out like a brace of Bovver Boys

And made no end of Democratic noise –

Thus manifesting Radical derision

For Hammerhead’s aesthetic of Precision.

Delivered as an incoherent shout

Their slogan was

‘Establishment Pigs Out’

(A bit steep, since Charles Ozbuns’s accounts

Bore witness to the staggering amounts

That both these rebels had received in Grants.)

‘Right lads,’

growled Hammerhead,

‘Let’s have their pants.’

The signal had been given for a Rumble,

And instantly the tent was all a-tumble.

The two teams clashed as heavy-shod as Squaddies.

The injured air was full of flailing bodies.

Emitting cries as cryptic as the Kabbalah’s

They flew around in furious parabolas

Like hungry beggars after spilled piastres –

A Pandemonium of Poetasters.

Rock Horrorball rushed in with whirling fists

To join Nuttcase and Jobbing in the lists,

Tripped over the recumbent form of Fluck

And vanished like a football in the ruck.

With cries no longer modern at Culloden,

Dunge rendered Nuttcase notably less sodden

By kicking him immensely in the scrotum –

Whereat he stuck his tongue out like a totem,

Disgorging such a quantity of grog

The smell of it got in your eyes like smog.

In no time Jobbing also was a wreck,

For Hammerhead had written him a cheque –

As rubber as a truncheon and as ruthless,

It bounced so hard it left its victim toothless.

The hugger-mugger raged on unabated –

From bad to worse the mayhem escalated.

The tent pegs gave as if they had been rotten.

The guy ropes snapped as if they had been cotton.

Its central pole knocked sideways by a boot,

The canvas settled like a parachute –

But even when entrapped in swathes of wrapping

The writhing combatants continued scrapping.

A fish too tiny for the trawling mesh,

Prykke worked a passage through the threshing flesh.

He tunnelled through the heap from gap to gap

And traced the tent’s hem till he found the flap.

He strode away, alert in every sense,

As if his thoughts encompassed Continents.

He reeled up Oxford Street and past Hyde Park,

His shining eyes twin diamonds in the dark.

He ate, when he got home to Pembridge Crescent,

A cold pork pie and felt he dined on pheasant.

He wrote, in prose appropriately cryptic,

Of Poetry approaching its Ecliptic.

Book Six

When Perry’s piece appeared, Success was clamorous.

Prykke’s Keen Approach abruptly became glamorous

Nobody else of his age was so sedulous,

Nobody else of any age so credulous.

Poseurs would praise themselves and he’d believe them!

Tired reputations sagged, he’d help retrieve them!

While all concerned adored what Perry said

About themselves, they never of course read

The plaudits which he might rain on a rival –

A fact that was the key to his survival.

Survive? But he did more than that. He flourished.

No longer looking wan and undernourished,

He fattened on that magic food, Renown –

The Dish You Know Will Never Let You Down.

Prykke’s eager parents bought ten copies each

Of all he wrote, and anyone in reach

Was forced to take a gander, even strangers.

Sweet Cynthia wrote warnings of the dangers

Inherent in the promptings of Ambition.

Too late, because the next Phase of the Mission

Was under way. A call from Terry Towelling!

A call that set Prykke’s mental sirens howling –

The kind of call at which your bloodstream freezes.

To write for the Observer! Holy Jesus!

‘Um um um um um um um um um um,’

Said Towelling. After which he seemed struck dumb

While waiting for a new thought to occur.

‘Er er er er er er er er er er . . . ‘

Poor Perry stared in wonder at the blower.

Did Entropy mean telephones ran slower?

He soon would know – and so be less censorious –

That Terry Towelling’s phone calls are notorious.

To kill the time the point takes to be reached

(The same time Nixon takes to be impeached)

You carry on with what it is you’re at –

With cooking, eating, sleeping, things like that –

And end the conversation fed and rested.

They way one famous critic, when requested

To do a job he failed to find amusing,

Amused his mistress three times while refusing.

‘Um um, we need the younger person’s view –

The view, that is, of er, someone like you –

On subjects like the ah, the ICA

Would um, you er, um care to? We ah, pay.’

‘Gosh,’

Prykke replied,

‘I know I’m deeply flattered.

We must treat Rebel Art as if it mattered:

I know that from Doc Stein and from El Al.

I’ll go this very evening to the Mall.’

The ICA in those days, than yourselves,

Would sooner have played host to gnomes and elves.

It crawled with lethal, Radicalized viruses

All standardized like figures on papyruses,

Conferring the name ‘poetry’ on verses

Which didn’t even make the grade as curses.

Shrill children vainly sought the tricky balance

Between what we’ll agree to call their Talents

And Fame’s demand that Art should be unique

By daubing pictures weird as they were weak,

While woaded pantaloons in dung-caked cerements

Were footling with theatrical Experiments

In which they were allowed to Improvise –

Which, in effect, means talk a pack of lies,

Since actors, when they plumb their recollection

Find little in there worth the resurrection

Except a load of trouper’s time-worn gimmickry,

Oudated dialogue and mouldy mimicry.

But all of this, it must be said in fairness,

Was organized to Further our Awareness

And not, as you might hazard, to exploit us.

The hero at the helm was Michael Koitus.

A natural, with his soothing Oxbridge tones,

For mentioning large sums down telephones,

Keen Koitus, most industrious of bosses,

Precisely supervised the place’s losses.

He never rested easy, always pondering

Forever more ambitious ways of squandering

The massive public funds which he was showered with.

The garden he was planted in and flowered with

Was Swinging London – now, alas, no more.

But Now means Later. This was still Before,

When books came out about the Power of Play

And Koitus held uninterrupted sway.

The ICA was jammed when Perry got there.

So who was there, you’re asking? Who was not there!

What churl would dare withhold a contribution

Towards the soaring costs of Revolution?

Cool Koitus suavely spoke some prolegomena.

To set the context for the night’s phenomena.

‘Our records show that in a single year

We’ve made a hundred thousand. Disappear.

The Philistines say, “Money down the drain”.

But take a look at what we stand to gain.

Pauline and Poogy Scheissenhaus have sent,

From Baader-Meinhof Studios in Ghent,

A flushing suite of white ceramic Art

With film-loops of an anaconda’s fart.

We’ve had a Warhol premiere, “Hot Crap”.

And Haiku Yamashita the Mad Jap

Has played a conga drum for fifteen hours

With one foot while the other arranged flowers.

There’s all of that, and then there’s coming soon

The Peking People’s Puppeteers’ Platoon

To fill our stage once more with their red flags

And captivate our kiddies with their gags

About the contradictions of Imperialism

Laid bare by dialectical materialism.

And then that ballet group who dance in Scuba

Equipment called the Rubber Freaks for Cuba

Are back, and then somebody takes a mudbath,

Or – wait a second – maybe it’s a bloodbath . . .

Well, anyway, there’s plenty on our plate.

But let’s kick off the show. It’s getting late.’

He exited. The first act on the bill

Came trotting on. O atavistic thrill!

Who else but Brian Gough and Henri Patten,

A double act beneath a sheet of satin

Complete with cardboard head and frayed rope tail?

The Panto Horse from Liverpool! Can’t fail.

From each end of the horse lines emanated

Alternately until its case was stated.

‘We are a pair of poets from the Mersey.’

‘We never had no nanny or no nursie.’

‘Our mothers wouldn’t let books in the house.’

‘We found out how to write from talking Scouse.’

‘That’s what makes all our poems easy listening.’

‘The scrubbers hear us read with knickers glistening.’

‘These are the only rhymes we’ve ever tried.’

‘It’s taken us so long we’ve nearly died.’

‘We’d rather type things straight on to the stencil.’

‘Than sit around for days and suck a pencil.’

‘The intellectual thing’s been done before.’

‘We also think there should be no more war.’

‘Nobody didn’t ought to be too clever.’

‘And everyone should stay eighteen forever.’

The Horse took several bows and off it pranced.

The crowd went mad while Perry sat entranced.

Now this was Life, by Intellect unvitiated:

The forceful Candour of the uninitiated.

For here was nothing underhand or stealthy –

Just simple, vibrant Strength, robust and healthy.

Prykke started to make notes, but then a roll

Of kettle drums which thrilled him to the soul

Announced the advent of a gorgeous creature

Sartorially superb in every feature.

Those doe-skin bowling shoes! That pink carnation!

That shy acknowledgement of adulation!

A national treasure like the Wall of Hadrian,

Who else, but Rebel Poet Mitch L. Adrian!

‘Bill Blake, they try to shoot you in My Lai,

But some of us refuse to let you die.

Bill Blake, they try to poison you in Laos,

But you reduce their crazy plans to chaos.

Bill Blake, they try to mine you in Haiphong,

But you outwit them like the Viet Cong.

Bill Blake, the whole Strategic Air Command

Could never bomb the pen out of your hand.

Bill Blake, you stand for thinking with the balls

The thoughts that melt their prison bars and walls.

Bill Blake, you know what’s real, you know what’s true,

And I know when I write that I am you.’

And so the last Narodnik took his leave

Full well might his applauding public grieve:

To be without him meant to be bereft

Of everything that Humanized the Left.

The next act was the undisputed Queen

Of London’s Revolutionary Scene,

A protegée of Creeping George McDeath.

Her name was Anna Pest. Prykke caught his breath.

He’d heard she was a knockout, but by Crikey!

La Pest was an assault course for the psyche:

A sight to stop a centaur in mid-gallop –

A newborn Venus served up in a scallop.

For Anna was no kewpie-doll like Cynthia

But something much more statue-on-a-plinthier.

A girl built like a Grecian Caryatid,

Except not even slightly chipped or battered.

The absolutely other thing, in fact:

Meticulously, exquisitely, Stacked.

That Pest was Mannequin as well as Poet –

You needn’t have been Sherlock Holmes to know it.

For one so sensitive as well as sinuous

Why shouldn’t the two callings be continuous?

She once appeared, stretched out full length, in Vogue,

To underline an elegy by Logue –

Ensuring that his lines remained unread,

Since everybody looked at her instead.

‘The monster, Sex, was present at my christening . . . ‘

She huskily began. Prykke wasn’t listening.

She read for some considerable time

Concoctions free of rhythm, metre, rhyme

Or any metaphors save inexact ones.

One found that when one finally had hacked one’s

Way through to what she meant, the sense had perished.

No matter, for already Perry cherished

(Fixated on the way her eyelids fluttered)

Each flaring imbecility she uttered.

Her long harangue at last came to a close.

Fond Prykke, along with those present rose

To greet her clinching statement with applause.

‘ . . . America, you rape me with your wars.’

As Prykke tracked Anna’s exit with a glance

Made glaucous by his meditative trance,

He would have sunk into a deeper paralysis

Except an uproar which defied analysis –

Drums, tubas, trumpets, rattles, tambourines –

Announced one of the all-time top routines

Since Torquemada put away his fetters:

Yes, Creeping George McDeath, Sick Man of Letters!

The art of Creeping George is so horrific it

Has seldom even got an ‘X’ Certificate.

Crushed bones and blood and brain-pulp are the stuff of it.

The necrophiles can’t seem to get enough of it.

The Muse, in Creeping George’s view, wears black

Stiletto jackboots and a rubber mac,

While Creeping George himself wears snakeskin ties –

And doesn’t always wait till the snake dies.

‘The blood has soaked the bone which hides the stone

The rat excreted in the telephone.

Fellating stone and bone I taste the blood

Which laps around my pelvis like a flood.

I feel a painful pressure in my groin

On either side of which I have a loin.

My loins are groined, my stone’s a bloody bone:

I’ll have to learn to leave myself alone.’

Cheers. Total tumult. Nothing could cap that.

As Creeping George slid off to feed his bat

And slid back on for umpteen curtain calls,

Pale Perry sat enchanted in the stalls.

‘But aren’t you Perry Prykke?’

breathed Anna Pest,

A butterfly come suddenly to rest

Exotically on Prykke’s astonished shoulder.

‘It’s funny – I’d expected someone older.

I worship the ripe wisdom of your work.

A critic of one’s Art who’s not a berk

Is someone to be valued. There’s a party.

I’ll take you to it in my Maserati.’

‘Er, gosh, Miss Pest, I worship your work too.

I’m interested in everything you do.

This party, though. I haven’t been invited . . . ‘

A V-12 engine piercingly ignited

And all the rest of Perry’s words were drowned

By shattering catastrophes of sound.

They hurtled through the midnight side by side,

Young Perry Prykke beside himself with pride

And Anna Pest superb as the aurora.

Avanti! Gangway! Tora Tora Tora!

Book Seven

The Marchioness of Properlittle-Rayver

Had never taken on a venture braver

Than victualling the Literary World.

The party wasn’t thrown so much as hurled.

Her modest residence in Holland Park

Was packed with different species, like the Ark:

They jammed it to the crystal chandeliers,

They scraped against the frames of the Vermeers.

The Marchioness’s forebears made their hay

By keeping hungry citizens at bay,

Discouraging requests for gifts of food

With measures firm and often downright rude.

Spilt milk. The current title-holder, though

(Though otherwise no glad hand with the dough)

Was willing to unlatch the family hampers

And hand around the scampi and the champers

To people with Artistic reputations –

The plain-clothes peerage of Communications.

‘I’m glad young Anna,’

barked the Marchioness,

‘Unearthed you. I did not know your address.

Some people here are going mad to meet you.

Some people here have said they’d like to eat you,

So how could you be less of an intruder?

You just leave Anna talking to Neruda

And go and chat to that man on the sofa.

He ought to come to you, but he’s a loafer.’

The gentleman so blithely indicated

Turned out to be a bard Prykke venerated

As harbouring a mind almost Miltonic,

A talent Keatsian, a soul Byronic.

That shirt, that glass of scotch, that shining skull;

Our lad was being welcomed by Bob Lull!

‘I’ve had your pieces brought to my attention,’

Croaked Lull.

‘I found it strange that you should mention

My own name in connection with Racine,

Donne Dante, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kydd and Greene:

I think perhaps just Shakespeare would have done.

But that aside, I’ve recently begun

A blank verse, five-act Version of “Tom Sawyer”

Bipolarized in terms of Paranoia,

In which I view the plain white light of Twain

Refracted through the prisms of my pain.

I never knew what words like Rough or Raw meant

Until I bared my poor mind to this torment.

My brain’s on fire, my enemies grow vicious:

The time could scarcely be more unpropitious

For launching a new venture in Our Trade.

Yes, Mr Prykke, I’m asking for your aid.’

‘Gosh, Mr Lull, in any way I can

I’ll do my best to help you with your plan.

I’m so surprised I don’t know what to say.

I’ll go and read “Tom Sawyer” right away.’

‘No, Mr Prykke, that’s just a tiny part

Of what I want to alter in my Art.

The place I want your help is in an area

Of which perhaps you might be somewhat warier:

The business I began some years ago

(And whose results so far I’m sure you know)

Of smashing up my work in angry fits

Until it’s strewn around in little bits,

Or ‘Sonnets’ as they’re kindly called by Faber –

Who undertake the monumental labour

Of marketing the stuff as something new

To fans who’ve seen it all before, like you.’

‘Gosh, Mr Lull, I have to disagree.

Your sonnet-cycles all sound fresh to me.

Tart, erudite, elliptical, persuasive,

Your Faustian persona’s all-pervasive.

Exploring cobwebbed corridors of Time

You never let your forms lapse into rhyme

But leave them all unfinished, like reality –

An Iso-Spatial Synchronous Modality.’

(From Yvor Frye, or was it Northrop Winters,

Young Perry picked these phrases up like splinters.)

‘I thank you, Mr Prykke, for your support.

It’s possible that I was overwrought.

It’s true indeed that better minds than mine

Have scrutinized my Sonnets line by line

And found in them the toughness of the Tetrarch,

The bloom of Brahms, the purity of Petrarch.

Thrust close against the glare of my creations

Perhaps I’m blinded by their scintillations.

Old Michelangelo, I can’t help feeling,

Had that same problem with the Sistine Ceiling.

It’s hard to see one’s own extent in toto.

There Proust would have agreed with me, and Giotto . . .

But modesty forbids that I expand

Much further on that theme you understand?

So let’s just say that my mature fertility

Could use assistance from your young agility.

I’ve put my output through that mincer once.

Before the fine edge of my talent blunts

I’d like to see if I can do it twice.

The challenge grips my forehead like a vice:

I want your help – I hope you won’t refuse –

To turn my Sonnets into Clerihews.’

‘Gosh, Sir, what makes you think I’m qualified –

A scholar so untested, so untried –

For this, the biggest job I’ve ever faced?’

‘You just,’

creaked Lull,

‘need scissors and some paste.’

Still gaping, Prykke was led away by Anna

To find his Fame was all around the manor.

He got on first-name terms with Kingsley Kong,

While Norman Moonbase taught him a rude song

About how Tony Godspell was a gremlin

Assigned to ruin Penguins by the Kremlin.

In no time these notorious Right-Wingers

Were known to Perry Prykke as ‘Norm’ and ‘Kingers’.

Green Berets briefed to win with utmost urgency

His heart and mind and counter his insurgency,

They dived right in and did not dilly-dally:

Would Prykke attend a Bertorelli Rally?

Just try and stop him! Tuesday then? Prykke nodded,

Struck mute. As if he needed to be prodded!

For at that famous kayf in Charlotte Street

The elite Fascists weekly meet to eat

And plan their latest last-ditch, Doomwatch caper –

White Guards unleashing tigers of Black Paper.

And there you find the clever Bernard Beaver –

The fervid, fevered, fulvid True Believer –

Who blows on Nixon’s coal to the last flicker

And backs the Pentagon through thick and thicker,

While zany Wildwind Wagtail shouts approval

And calls for Arthur Balfour’s prompt removal.

(On being told that Balfour is long dead,

Mad Wagtail rolls up little balls of bread

And shies them at the waitresses like pebbles,

Convinced that he is executing rebels.)

John Brainwave then contributes his opinions

On what should be the fate of Mao’s minions.

‘The students should be killed. They should be dead.

You hear me? I said “dead”. Hear what I said?

They should be stood against a wall and shot.

Not just a few. Not most. I mean the lot.’

Then Moonbase sings a song, Kong does a mime,

And everyone pays heed to Tony Time,

Who peels his lips back from his teeth like scrolls

And with a blue-blood’s tortured drawl unrolls

An extract from the history long as Rome’s

Contained in Tony Time’s Twelve Teeming Tomes.

This coven of Cold Warriors and Hawks

Can boast the membership of Philip Lawks,

Who sometimes travels South to sit about in it

While sipping strong brown ale and saying nowt in it:

For Lawks in London’s just another tourist,

Of all dour Northern tourists he’s the dourest,

Though some say that at home he’s far less dull –

And there they call him Don Juan in Hull.

Imagining such eminent companions

Exchanging quips like ricochets in canyons,

Prykke gaped in awe. The gape became a gasp.

The Literary World was in his grasp!

And so, with one hand spilling pink champagne

And by the other hauled on like a train,

Our Perry cannoned vaguely through the cumulus

Of household names from tumulus to tumulus.

His eyes with Famous Faces were regaled

Until his heart ran hot and almost failed:

For here the old High-Born and new Self-Made

Homogenized into a Hit Parade.

The bright lights of the ’Thirties never dwindle

And here was one before him, Stephen Spindle,

Avowing he thought Perry wrote prose finer

Than Christopher and Wystan wrote in China.

And Frankie Mode, Ubiquitous Professor

Just passing through from Dallas to Odessa,

Stood weightless before Perry like a ghost –

His body somewhere near the Danish coast.

Assuring purring Perry that his pieces

In acumen were wealthier than Croesus,

Mode faded inward from the edges eerily,

And where he was, a jet stream whistled wearily.

Suave editors pressed forward to make offers

That started elbow-deep inside their coffers –

The days were done, it seemed, when Prykke reviewed

A novel just to flog the thing for food.

Now Clara Tomahawk and N. T. Thweet

Stood toe to toe before him to compete

For opportunities to print his writing –

A cut-throat contest fully as exciting

As all the speedway pile-ups in Ben Hur.

Without procrastination or demur,

Pissed Prykke was gaily saying Yes to each of them

When Anna quickly whirled him out of reach of them

To meet the publisher, Wee Georgie Wide,

Who ushered him paternally aside

And got him to agree to write a Book –

The most decisive step Prykke ever took.

His bug eyes straying constantly to Anna,

Wide’s mouth evoked an avalanche of manna

Engulfing Prykke so deep no one would find him

Once Tightenbelt and Buckledown had signed him.

‘Mine boy, you are the likeliest new challenger

I’m seeing come along since J. D. Salinger.

You got a style on you like Norman Mailer’.

Wide whispered, and pale Prykke grew even paler,

Bedizened by the flattery Wide uttered –

The furthest up he’d ever yet been buttered.

‘You stick mit Georgie, kid. I’ll see you right.

I tell you vot. Veal clinch the deal tonight.

Most boys I vont for nine years. Sometimes ten.

For you, I’ll say eleven. Got a pen?’

The documents came out, Prykke’s name went on,

The deal was sealed with Moët & Chandon –

Enough to make the average supertanker

Bend double at the bows and and drag its anchor.

Our friend’s last recollection of the gathering

Was Anna’s tongue luxuriously lathering

His ear lobe and her perfumed voice implying

The time was ripe for young folk to be hieing

Them home to slide beneath a cosy quilt.

And so, without the smallest trace of guilt –

For when is feeling that good ever bad? –

Our lad was off to Anna’s Park Lane pad.

I’ll have to draw a veil on its appointments,

Its incense and its essences and ointments,

The tapestries and inlays and enamels,

The skins and furs from reptiles and from mammals.

Let’s just content ourselves with merely noting

Our sobbing hero felt that he was floating

Towards the outer limits of exoticism

Excoriated by her wild eroticism –

Sensations so outlandish Perry thought

She’d have to go to jail if she was caught.

Adrift in rich pavilions and pagodas

He breathed unnerving, fluctuating odours:

Astringent tangs compounded of Chanel

And oysters lying helpless in the shell.

He touched an orb of amber rubbed with silk,

He tasted avocados pulped in milk.

She taught him things that felt as nice as flying

And even nicer things that hurt like dying.

Of Cynthia, the Love he’d left behind,

In Perry’s mind the memory declined –

A bonbon overwhelmed by a bonanza.

Yes, Anna Pest was en extravaganza.

Book Eight

The high point of Prykke’s time on Earth had come.

We’ll savour it a moment. Perry’s Mum,

On learning that her Son’s path to Success

By now involved an actual Marchioness,

Erupted in a fugue of exultation

She had to be brought down from by sedation.

Not only willingly but even meekly

All monthly magazines and every weekly

Accepted anything Prykke thought as Topical:

Young Peregrine was so hot he was tropical.

By night you’d hear him laying down the law

On all the Radios from 1 to 4

With special emphasis, of course, on 3,

Where Creeping George McDeath would frequently

Inveigle him to do a solemn summary

Of all the latest Literary mummery.

And Philip Phrog, key man of Kritiks’ Kworum,

Roped Prykke into that game of cockalorum

Where pundits crammed with intellectual calories

From books and plays and cinemas and galleries

Scrum down like front-row forwards with their tongues out

Around a microphone and shout their lungs out.

And thus Prykke joined Steam Radios’ tight team

Of people primed to Talk on Any Theme,

A mafia of men with minds like swords

As well as some extremely brainy broads –

And truth to tell our lad found nothing easier

Than hanging on the lips of Lady Freesia

Or trading witticisms with Mag Scrabble

Or letting Margerina Latchkey babble.

The more that Perry made himself available

The more he found his Keen Approach was saleable,

A beau mentir qui vient de loin, not so?

On Television too, our Perry bloomed.

He bloomed? He boomed, he roared, he soared, he zoomed!

He showed a gift for popularized gab

Which rivalled even that of Marvin Grabb,

Whose show it was that he appeared on most –

Preceded by a build-up from his host.

‘And with us in our studio once more

Is Perry Prykke the critic, and I’m sure

That you won’t – I know I won’t – find it dull

To hear what he’s been doing with Bob Lull,

The man who wants to make his poems smaller.

A poem is, I’m certain you recall, a,

Well, smallish piece of writing which has got

Er, rhythm – or, in Lull’s case, which has not.’

‘Gosh, thank you, Marv. I’m glad to say that Bob

Has given me a free hand on this job,

Including open access to his diaries.

I should be soon completing my inquiries

And hope to get clear pictures of the state

Of mental agony we know the Great

Have always manifested throughout history.

We might just have the answer to the mystery.’

‘That’s marvellous, Perry. More from him next time,

But now we’re due to see a famous mime.

It’s Haiku Yamashita from Japan.

A mime is someone, usually a man,

Who doesn’t need his voice to tell you things.

And then, for jazz fans, “Jelly” Belly sings!’

His prominence endorsed by Private Eye –

Who mentioned him in every second lie

And printed bits cut out from what he said

Sent in by dolts whose lips moved when they read –

Prykke seemed to be poised at the apogee

Of every single ladder, heap or tree:

He even found his name used by Bron Wan

(An infant who can’t grasp that Youth is gone)

To spark the kind of envy-ridden rumour

Where want of truth’s offset by want of humour.

It lacked, however, one last accolade

To show how utterly he’d made the grade.

But finally that happened, in The Times:

A lovingly assembled set of rhymes

Entitled, To a Young Man Almost There:

An Old Man’s Tribute – by Lord Teddybear.

‘I cast a wise old eye upon young Prykke

And feel that once again I ride my bike

Towards some nameless, adolescent thrill

Recumbent at the foot of Rosslyn Hill.

‘Ah me, the joy of Starting Out again!

Of taking tea with well-informed young men

(Supposing they still do that nowadays)

Who loll about dispensing blame and praise!

‘To look on Literature as some fresh church

Discovered behind screens of larch and birch!

To say of it, “How finely bricked and plastered!”

And hear it murmur back, “You fey old bastard!”

‘It must be wonderful to be Beginning,

To lay the basis for a whole new inning.

Monumentum requiris? Look around.

I think my clockwork panda’s overwound.

‘So square the marble slab to build your edifice

Young Prykke! But different Endings lie ahead of us,

For I have got it made while you must quarry it,

And that is why I am the Poet Laureate.’

The Prykke renown seemed limitless, unbounded,

Its heights unreachable, its depths unsounded.

He gave himself a lifetime to enjoy it,

All unawares the thing that would destroy it

Was even then, and by his own endeavour,

Collecting strength to wreck his name forever.

It was the Book, the Book it was to blame:

The Book that should have reinforced his fame

But punctured it instead and brought it crashing –

Pink flames of hydrogen profusely splashing –

With incandescent girders to Disaster.

The plaudits which had made his heart beat faster

Had given him a sense of his own worth.

A brand-new Perry Prykke had come to birth:

A Prykke who dared to qualify his praise

Of writers with the odd paternal phrase

Suggesting So-and-So, though near perfection,

Had minor faults requiring some correction.

Though Hammerhead, Prykke wrote, dwarfed Baudelaire,

He ought to make appearances less rare;

Though Mitch L. Adrian had joined the Greats

He still had several things to learn from Yeats;

Though Harsfried was at one with the Eternal

He lacked sufficient nut around the kernel;

Doug Dunge could learn a thing or two from Browning

And Churchill College take a tip from Downing –

Doc Stein should be, like Looseleaf, for Felt Life

(A dictum which cut both ways, like a knife:

For Looseleaf ought to grant Stein more respect

Concerning the Collapse of Intellect).

The book was called Loose Laurels. It was bold,

And one brave statement made your blood run cold.

Intrepid Prykke said Lull, by just a skerrick,

Fell short of being totally Homeric!

Aware that not in Fame but in Authority

Is housed the only true Superiority,

Dim Perry must have thought a show of rigour

Would help him cut a more distinguished figure.

If that was his idea, he quickly rued it.

The people who were in the book reviewed it!

And what they found was something worse than witticisms,

Squibs, epigrams or wisecracks. They found Criticisms!

Restrictions placed upon their giant stature!

Irreverent gibes wrapped up in nomenclature!

A crawling bum they’d picked out of the gutter!

They’d known him when his mouth would not melt butter!

And here he was, the two-faced little sod,

Excreting on their stuff like he was God!

Book Nine

The Notices hit Prykke like heart attacks.

He staggered from the blows of El Al’s axe,

While Hammerhead’s sharp biro pierced his lung;

By Harsfried in the Statesman he was hung,

Cut down, cut up, rolled flat and then cremated;

By Creeping George McDeath he was castrated.

As N. T. Thweet took time and space to mount a

Retaliatory air-strike in Encounter,

Mitch Adrian said Prykke was in the pay

Of both the FBI and CIA,

While Kong claimed Prykke received a monthly fee

From both the TUC and KGB.

Bob Lull attacked him with the family sabre.

Doug Dunge took careful aim and tossed a caber.

Doc Stein joined in, insisting all that stuff

About the Verbal Holocaust was guff.

He couldn’t think where Perry must have read it.

It wasn’t in Stein’s books. He’d never said it.

No, Stein had just been quoting Leopardi,

Or Tristan Corbière or Thomas Hardy,

Or maybe – ah yes, that was it – Franz Werfel.

Deplorable. Prykke should have been more careful.

(For Stein, you see, could hear the ticking clock,

And knew that Perry’s time was nigh. The Doc,

Though pretty swift already at contriving

To climb on board a bandwagon arriving,

Is so quick climbing off it’s breath-bereaving

Should that same vehicle show signs of leaving.)

What better time for Perry’s Mum to send

A tear-stained telegram from Audley End?

‘Please don’t come here for Xmas. Go to Rome.

Why not try Tokyo? But don’t come home.

We’re moving out to stay at your Aunt Nina’s.

The neighbours here are laughing like hyenas.’

His brilliant future blasted in the bud,

Prykke’s name in Bertorelli’s was now Mud.

Served hand and foot by coolie, cooled by punkah,

The Tuesday Fascists lunching in their bunker

Dropped hints it might be on the whole more pleasant

If Perry could contrive not to be present.

The buzz from Soho said that Hammerhead

Was grooming someone younger in Prykke’s stead

Who might get right what Perry had got wrong –

A clever son of Kingsley’s called Kid Kong.

The ICA called Perry a Defeatist,

A Category-Mongering Elitist –

Acceptance was what Art was all about,

And that was why they had to kick him out.

Phil Phrog and Creeping George and Marvin Grabb

No longer seemed so keen to send a cab

And haul him off to BH or TC.

Prykke was as infra dig as Simon Dee,

A Has-been of the Airwaves and the Screens –

And similarly of the Magazines,

Since neither Towelling, Tomahawk nor Mauler

Nor Thweet was any more a morning caller

To ask him for a quick piece on Max Weber

Or some duff poet canonized by Faber –

And Frankie Mode wrote briefly from Brazil

Advising Prykke will ill-concealed ill will

The ‘Modish Masters’ Series would not need

That book which he was planning on Lou Reed –

While Wide, to put the cap on the attainder,

Consigned ‘Loose Laurels’ wholesale to remainder –

A bargain bookworms warily inspected,

Rejecting it as if it were infected.

Deducing Prykke had lapsed into disfavour

The Marchioness of Properlittle-Rayver

Endorsed the literati’s verdict massively

By simply lying back and acting passively.

She spent no time composing scorn to pour on him,

Since all she had to do was shut the door on him

And instantly his status was no higher

Than somewhere between polecat and pariah.

She slammed it. Far away, Prykke heard it boom

And knew that she had sealed his social doom.

For Perry-About-Town the end had come.

Beau Prykke was Acherontis pabulum.

Would everyone deny him in his need?

Would even Anna laugh to see him bleed?

From Notting Hill the long mile to Park Lane

He stumbled in the early morning rain,

Afraid in his chill heart she’d ceased to care.

She had indeed. She wasn’t even there.

She’d been involved with Harsfried for a week:

They were out together dancing, chic to chic.

It was the last, dark hour before the dawn.

Poor Perry reached his room completely shorn

Of all his erstwhile appetite for living.

The Literary World is unforgiving,

That much he knew. There could be no way back.

He felt the pressure at his waist go slack

And saw his belt half-hitched around a beam.

He watched himself like someone in a dream

Construct a scaffold largely from Larousse

Encyclopedias and tie the noose.

He kicked off from a stack of Livres de Poche.

The last word that he ever heard was,

‘Gosh.’

Book Ten

The evil tidings coiled and thinly curled

And drifted through the Literary World.

Obituaries stressed the victim’s Youth,

The risks attendant on the Search for Truth.

The Guardian had something signed by Stein

Connecting Prykke’s demise to Our Decline.

‘The Overriding Need for an Alliance

Persists between the Cultures Art and Science.

Will music make the Relevant Connection?

Until it does, we all must face infection.

A few will die, like Prykke, like Gaudier,

Like Mandelstam, Camus and Hemingway,

Like Mayakovsky, Jackson, Pollock, Lorca . . .’

He printed it again in the New Yorker.

Sere Looseleaf wrote a letter no one saw

To some review that died before the war.

‘In placing self-destructive insecurity

Beside the dying Lawrence’s maturity,

We cannot help but find Prykke’s flight of panic

Against Life. Uncreative. Inorganic.’

El Al brought out his book on Suicide –

A publishing success for Georgie Wide

Which helped him to offset the Perry flop.

For Perry’s Mother, life came to a stop:

The rest of it is no concern of mine.

No more is Dr Cynthia Devine,

Who’s now at Lady Margaret Hall and lost in

Composing A New Reading of Jane Austen.

The Wake for Perry in the Gates of Hell

Went off, so legend tells us, pretty well.

A score or so of literati came

Of whom a handful still recalled his name

And three of those had heard the tragic news.

All present went like camels through the booze

And presently the booze all went through them.

If joined the cigarette butts, scum and phlegm

That choked the white-tiled gutters in the bog.

It trickled through, then tunnelled like a trog

The sodden furlongs to the sewage farm,

And there was scoured and filtered free of harm

Before they spread it thin to be sucked high

By London’s fitful Sun into the sky

In proper time to reimburse the rain

And so in due course tumble down again

To meet the Thames and with the turning tide

Revolve into an eddy, boil and slide

From bridge to bridge and Pool to Estuary

And so on, ever Eastward, to the Sea.

A tenuous memento of our Perry

Finessed to bubbles by the Channel Ferry.

A distant memory of beer and whisky

Disintegrating in the Bay of Biscay.

And so our story ends. Its simple moral

Is one with which I’m certain few will quarrel.

The Literary World is you and I:

We change from day to day or else we die.

The Innocent should stay the way they are:

For them, to live means following their Star.

The one thing they must do is trust in Fate.

The one thing they must not, manipulate.

For that, they just aren’t built to stand the pace –

So if we break their hearts, it’s no disgrace.

It’s just a shame. And that’s what he was like.

‘The good die young’

hic jacet

Perry Prykke.