Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (review)

THE CRIMES AND FOLLIES OF MANKIND

The word satire has an interesting etymology. Despite its frequent concern – some might say, on the evidence of this anthology, its obsession – with lechery, it has nothing to do with cloven-footed satyrs or satyriasis. No; it derives ultimately from the Latin satis, enough; and more immediately from saturus, a miscellaneous stew. Certainly anyone who read straight through the ninety-seven poets represented here (only two of them women, incidentally) would emerge thoroughly satiated by the variety and succulence of the ingredients in the satiric stew. Eating habits. Ireland. Wife-beaters. The military (“mouths with­out hands, maintained at vast expense” according to Dryden, who, having gone through a few brief morning exercises, “hasten to be drunk, the busi­ness of the day”). Tobacco. Those appetitive wives “who with insatiate heavings call for more” – Dryden again). The bovine complacency of socie­ty's middle orders, like Prior's Sauntering Jack and Idle Joan who “walked and eat, good folks: what then?/ Why then they walked and eat again”, and their far descendant, Auden's Unknown Citizen: “when there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went”. Feminists. Spas. Librarians (“unlearned men of books assume the care/ As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair” – Edward Young).

This random selection of things which have attracted the ire and exercised the wits of poets over more than five centuries shows that satire is truly the olla podrida of literature. But over that large span of time though the subjects have been varied enough the motives and the technique of the satirist have remained constant. Always he has held a fine balance between humour, didacticism and abuse. His purpose is to condemn, but not to do so solemnly; to teach, but not moralise. At heart he is a romantic, an idealist. His assault, even while it seems to despair of man and his works, must at least implicitly hint at how things might he improved. Certainly the satirist enjoys his attack and he must convey his enjoyment. He can even enjoy, masochistically, the violation of his own idealism. This is the note struck in John Betjeman’s Huxley Hall, which has the poet meditating in a Garden City café before attending a lecture on Sex and Civics. He watches children playing:

Barry smashes Shirley's dolly, Shirley's eyes are crossed in hate,

Comrades plot a comrade's downfall “in the interests of the State”.

Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime-juice minus gin,

Quite can drown a faint conviction that we may be born in Sin.

The specific target here, of course, is humanism and its social nostrums which, as is plain from the highly conditional last line, the poet himself finds inviting; but the general lesson is that of all satire: Let us see man more clearly for what he is! And having seen, let us try to reform him!

It is a sad comment on human nature that the satirists have hardly ever interpreted 'man' to mean the poet himself. Satirical self-analysis is a rare form indeed. It may be found in the works of the libertine Rochester, notably in his famous and long-unprintable The Disabled Debauchee. As an active rake, he grimly anticipates the time when “by pox and time's unlucky chance” he will have been forced into unwilling temperance. Still, his memories will be some consolation; memories of lavish bisexual couplings and triplings:

Nor shall our love-fits, Cloris, be forgot,

When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’enjoy.

And the best kiss was the deciding lot

Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy —

a verse which is a fine sample of Rochester’s characteristic blend of desperate gaiety and cold self-loathing. A much lighter piece of self-mockery – in the vein of what Grigson, the editor of this anthology, calls “the satire of milder levity” – is the charming Satire Addressed to a Friend by a contemporary of Rochester’s, John Oldham. This verse-letter is which commiserates with a college friend who has just come down; an earnest youth, apparently, and “well fraught with learning” but not exactly fit for anything in particular. The options before this friend, who is poor (“your whole estate /And all your fortune lie beneath your hat”) are limited. Holy orders? Not really. That racket’s finished: “half the number of the sacred herd /Are fain to stroll, and wander unpreferred.” A schoolmaster, then? Well, maybe; but if so, be content with a fiddler’s wages. Nowadays a father expects to spend more on his pet dog than his heir. What about a secretaryship in a noble family? But that, while it is at least worth “diet, an horse, and thirty pounds a year,” is otherwise just refined slavery. What, then? How is one honourably to fill the importunate “bladder and twelve yards of gut”? By begging, says Oldham darkly – and if necessary with a counterfeit wooden leg. Anything for freedom: his ideal is the old, old one: “a small estate, a few choice books and fewer friends . . .” Poor Oldham never had to face the problem he set his friend. He died in 1683, at thirty.

But if self-analysis has always been rare, when the target is other people and things the poets have very cheerfully risen to the challenge. But what things, exactly? This anthology is so large and comprehensive that the first impression is one of bewildering diversity. One is initially inclined to think that satirical verse is naturally bound to the transient irritations and absurdities of society. But looking closer one finds that this is not so. Many targets have, to be sure, withered and fallen away, preserved up to the present day only in the amber of the poet's hatred. Just a few have remained perennials over the centuries. They are the clergy, the court, and the contemporary world of letters. The failings of these three have supplied inex­haustible quantities of fuel which have kept the furnaces of poetic satire perpetually well stoked.

Take the clergy, for example. From Chaucer to Clough, from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason over the span of six centuries the poets have taken it as axiomatic, a fact beyond any possible cavil, that your average clergyman is a lecherous and corrupt timeserver. In the seven­teenth century not only was the clergy's taste for bloodthirsty disputation thoroughly jeered at — “such as do build their faith upon / The holy text of pike and gun” — but their venality and willingness to set their sail to whatever ideological wind is blowing strongest were cut to pieces in the slicing tetrameters of Butler's Hudibras:

What makes all doctrines plain and clear?

About two hundred pounds a year.

And that which was proved true before,

Prove false again? Two hundred more.

Nothing had changed a century later when: according to William Cowper, the prize of a bishopric “demands an upward look/ Not to be found by poring on a book . . . / The parson knows enough who knows a duke.”

As doctrinal divisions faded away with the new century, the satirists homed in on clerical gluttony and lechery. These were indeed far from new vices. Chaucer in his day had memorably condemned both though almost in passing, as one might irritably condemn the En­glish weather for being bad even while knowing it is irremediably so. Richard Savage even managed to wrap up both vices into one unattractive bundle. He offers us a parson who

Swills, sucks, and feeds, till lech'rous as a sparrow

Thy pleasure, Onan, now no more delights,

The lone amusement of his chaster nights . . .

He plies her now with love, and now with pills.

These kill her embryo, and preserve her honour.

In the same century Pope, in a masterly piece of scene-painting, has the ironic vision of a bishop who, seeing a dean whoring in St James Park, spurs him on:

Proceed (he cried) proceed, my reverend brother,

'Tis fornicatio simplex and no other:

Better than lust for boys, with Pope and Turk.

But in our time the failings of the clergy as a satirical subject have almost faded from view, for reasons which are sufficiently obvious. We live in an age when the news that the Pontiff has forgiven the man who wounded him is buzzed about the world as an act of nearly supernatural virtue. As a general rule we have come to expect little or nothing of our clergy's private behaviour. If they are incontinent we rather like it; it makes them seem more human; our humorous nerve is touched rather than our satiric one. This antholo­gy gives us just one piece of contemporary religi­ous satire, Fenton and Fuller's Poem Against Catholics, which has one Father Flynn

Explaining why the Church holds it a sin:

"You mustn't ever hold it. That's called jerking

off. Six mea culpas, Benedict"

Compare these lines with those of Butler or Pope: far from being aggressive, they are languid, indulgent even. Catholicism's attitude to adoles­cent sex can still just about raise a titter, but hardly indignation. But savage indignation is the very pulse of satire.

Turning with some relief from the clergy to the court, we are quickly reminded that despite much handwringing over public criticism of the monarchy the present general respect and admiration enjoyed by the Royal Family is very much a modern aberration. It is the consequence, in fact, of a PR exercise which was mounted with immense success in the middle of the last century and whose effects still linger. The idea that the monarchy could ever recommend itself as the very image of bourgeois domesticity would have amazed our forebears. For in every other age public opinion as it found voice in the most popular and most accomplished poets (and certainly not the mere railing poetasters) has derided the monarchy for its arrogance, its stupidity, its lechery. "Restless he rolls about from whore to whore" wrote Rochester with incontestable truth of Charles II, adding for good measure: “Nor are his high desires above his strength / His sceptre and his — are of a length.” If we ask what right Rochester has to point the finger, we can turn instead to Andrew Marvell, on the taste of one royal “whore” (Lady Castlemaine) for rough trade:

She through her lackey's drawers, as he ran,

Discerned love's cause and a new flame began . . .

His brazen calves, his brawny thighs — the face

She slights — his feet shaped for a smoother race.

Nor were later dynasties by any means exempt. The restoration poets are all of a piece with Tom Moore imagining the Prince Regent bedded down in Brighton Pavilion, “his legs full of gout and his arms full of HERTFORD.”

But it is when the butt of the satirical poet is his own fellow labourer in the literary vineyard that we can best see the acute difference between what the past and the present would tolerate. The satirical abuse of poets by poets has not in our day ceased; not quite:

How like the old clown's sausages are his cantos

Yard after yard of unlikeable comestible,

Chockfull of bran and highly indigestible.

Thus Robert Nichols on Ezra Pound, in lines which are witty, specific and didactic. But Nichols is not very typical. Far more so is, say, Roy Campbell’s diffuse attack on the campus poet: “Our universities / Whose crystal roofs should hatch with genial ray/ A hundred mushroom poets every day.” Well yes, fair enough: we know what he means. But: Who? Launching an attack on “mushroom poets” is about as satisfying as punching a bag of fairy floss. Once upon a time they managed these matters more directly. Thus Shelley on Wordsworth in Peter Bell the Third:

Peter was dull — he was at first

Dull — oh, so dull, so very dull!

This has bite enough; but still, though the satirist's fangs dig deep they don't rip away great chunks of flesh. By Shelley's time there was already abroad the feeling that a victim has some rights, and Wordsworth was at least allowed to shelter behind a pseudonym. But go back a century, and what do we find? Among other delicacies, Henry Carey on Ambrose Philips, who was a hapless versifier who turned a lucrative penny writing effete nursery rhymes; or, as Carey put it, “piddling ponds of pissy-piss.” He continues in the same scatological vein:

Now he foots it like a lord;

Now he pumps his little wits,

Shitting writes, and writing shits,

All by tiny little bits . . .

There is much more of the same, all of it terse, memorable and pitiless. (It's worth recalling that some years after producing this effusion Carey wrote the words of God Save the King and that later still he killed himself. Here there is surely a lesson.) No one today would write like Carey, nor indeed like most of the poets from the middle pages of the anthology. It is worth asking ourselves why.

The fact is that the age of great satire is long gone. The very proportions of this anthology reveal this truth: the Victorian age and our own despite their great poetic output are allotted only about thirty pages; the eighteenth century, about five times as much including generous servings the two greatest names of all, Pope and Byron. We lack that instinct for the jugular which is central to classical satire; lack the zeal to wield the lash heartily and have no stomach for the naming of names. Nor is it simply the laws of libel which restrain us, for such laws merely codify restraints on expression which we are broadly willing to accept anyway. If there were the will to write lines like Carey’s Namby-Pamby and an audience to devour them, no law could prevent them any more than the literature of political dissidence is prevented under totalitarianism. The fact that we have no samizdat satire at any level higher than a toilet wall circulating in manuscript can only be because the conditions for its production and appreciation have ceased to exist.

No, the real taboos derive not from the law but from the code of manners. Our reluctance to, as we say, “descend to personalities” (how quaint Defoe or Swift would have found that phrase!) is the by-product of a century’s humanitarianism. The price we’ve paid for the RSPCA is a latter-day Carey. A society that can taste the fierce delight of Pope’s line on Lord Hervey (“Sporus”) has to be small and well-knit; but it probably also has to be one that is prepared to tolerate severed heads on Temple Bar. Though our eyes are no less acute than past moralists’ for evil, folly and vanity, we tend to see these as social defects, and it is society, that comfortable abstraction, that we are happiest castigating. It was Pope, the great theorist of satire as well as its supreme practitioner, who addressed this inclination in his Epilogue to the Satires. The “Friend” there makes a plea to “spare then the person, and expose the vice”. Pope of course rejects this plea (“How Sir! not damn the sharper, but the dice?”) but it’s a plea that we, by and large, have come to find persuasive. Pope’s answer makes us feel uncomfortable. The “dice” can’t bleed, however rude we are; the “sharper” can – and he can also sue. Pity and self-interest alike counsel us to avert our eyes. And so it is that that the very rhetoric of cold abuse which fills the earlier part of this Oxford Book – Dryden, for instance, on Shaftsbury

In friendship false, implacable in hate;

Resolved to ruin or to rule the State

Or, again, on Buckingham who

in the course of one revolving moon,

Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:

Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking . . .

– is a rhetoric which would look very strange in a page of modern verse. Clive James has an enviable wit, but when, in Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage, he satirises the figures of literary London, those very figures roll over on their backs, tongues lolling, begging for another scratch from James’s amiable pen: one of his victims, Martin Amis, even served as reader in a public performance of the poem. No one, in fact, believes James means it. And the truth is he doesn’t. Being part of that world himself, when he springs and pounces, his claws are always sheathed. Peregrine Prykke is witty all right, but it has a marshmallow centre. No one could possibly resent it enough to have James bludgeoned in a dark alley, as Dryden was.

Satire itself being hard to define, no anthology of it can hope universally to please. Anyone picking up this one will thumb through it first for his favourite passages, and it is a tribute to the editor and he will find most of them. The omission of any Shakespeare is surprising. One will look in vain for the railings of Thersites, or the reflections of Timon in Act Three of Timon of Athens when he invites his ‘friends’ to supper and serves them water. Nor will one find any of the anti-Jacobin verse of Canning and Frere, not even the well-known lines concluding The Loves of the Triangles which imagine Pitt guillotined in an English Terror:

Then twitch, with fairy hands, the frolic pin –

Down falls th’impatient axe with deafening din;

The liberated head rolls off below,

And simpering Freedom hails the happy blow!

Though these lines are parodic (of Erasmus Darwin’s absurd Loves of the Plants) they are also as satirical about Whig enthusiasm for the Revolution as one could wish for. But in general Grigson casts his net very wide – so long as one bears in mind that ‘verse’ means verse in English, and mostly that written in England – and once more demonstrates that there are more good fish in the sea of literature than have ever been drawn out of it.

Quadrant, October 1981.