Poet's Pub
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
POET’S PUB
ERIC LINKLATER was a Scottish writer born in Penarth, Wales, on March 8, 1899. Although Linklater initially studied medicine, he later became interested in journalism. Much of his writing is based on his experience in the military and his extensive travels of the world. During World War I, he served as a sniper with a Scottish infantry regiment, and after suffering a severe head injury he was hospitalized for several months. In the 1930s he became a full-time writer, publishing novels, poetry, short fiction, satires, travel pieces, children’s books, war histories, and two volumes of autobiography. The satirical Juan in America examines the catastrophe that was Prohibition, while Private Angelo humorously recounts the postwar reorganization in Italy. His children’s novel The Wind on the Moon was awarded the Carnegie Medal. Poet’s Pub was adapted into a British comedy film in 1949.
NANCY PEARL is a literary critic, a librarian, and the author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. She is a regular commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition and the 2004 winner of the Women’s National Book Association Award.
ERIC LINKLATER
Poet’s Pub
Foreword by
NANCY PEARL
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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books Limited 1929 First published in the United States of America by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith 1930 This edition with a foreword by Nancy Pearl published in Penguin Books 2012
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Copyright The Estate of Eric Linklater, 1929
Foreword copyright © Nancy Pearl, 2012
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ISBN: 978-1-101-58483-5
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Elspeth Mary
Contents
Foreword by NANCY PEARL
POET’S PUB
Foreword
You are about to begin one of the most delightful novels I’ve ever read. I first encountered Eric Linklater’s Poet’s Pub when I was working at Yorktown Alley, a wonderful independent bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1985, Penguin, as part of the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, presented to booksellers boxed sets of facsimiles of the very first ten Penguins ever printed as a thank-you for their longtime support. (In addition to the set of books, our sales representative also presented me with a stuffed animal—a penguin—that I named Howard Slutes, in his honor. It still graces my fireplace hearth today.)
In the 1930s, Allen Lane, an editor at Bodley Head (a major British publishing company), was given the responsibility of selecting the first books considered of literary quality to be reprinted in paperback (“penny dreadfuls” were already available in paper editions at the time). Due to the popularity of these new paperbacks, Lane was able to spin off Penguin as an independent publisher, rather than have it remain an imprint of Bodley Head. The original paperbacks Lane published were all branded as Penguin Books on the cover, along with the logo of the eponymous penguin. He succeeded beyond all expectations in his mission of making good books more accessible (and less expensive) than they’d been before. (Jeremy Lewis’s Penguin Special: The Story of Allen Lane, the Founder of Penguin Books and the Man Who Changed Publishing Forever, is an excellent biography that vividly captures Lane’s outsize personality.)
The ten titles that Allen Lane chose to be published under the Penguin imprint are fascinating to consider. I’d love to have been at a dinner party with Lane at the time so I could have asked him, Why this book by that author and not another one? And why indeed this author at all, rather than that one? Taken together, the books constitute an amalgam of what was on offer to serious readers in the early decades of the twentieth century. These first ten Penguins include novels by authors still read and enjoyed today, as well as others who are now much less known (if known at all). Eight of the first ten were novels, one was a biography, and one was an autobiography.
The famous (or infamous, depending upon your opinion of Lane’s choices) ten are Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. (The popularity of these is such that someone is probably reading them even at the moment I write this sentence.) Included as well were Ariel, a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley by André Maurois; Carnival, a memoir by Beverley Nichols; four little-read-today novels by Compton Mackenzie, Mary Webb, E. H. Young, and Susan Ertz. And, of course, Poet’s Pub.
The hero of Poet’s Pub is Saturday Keith, the seventh son of his parents. He was, to be sure, born on a Saturday. (His eldest brother had been born on a Sunday, second-eldest on a Monday, and so on, but they were given more usual names. It was only when the seventh baby seemed eager to enter the world late on Friday night that Saturday’s father, intrigued with the notion of having a child born on every day of the week, encouraged his wife with these words: “Hold him, my love, hold him! There’s an hour to go yet. Be brave, my dear, this is the last one, I swear.”) Saturday attends Oxford, where he wins a rowing blue, awarded for high achievement in university sports (although to his sorrow he loses the most important race, against Cambridge). He also writes spectacularly abysmal poetry, although he rather likes his own work (several cringeworthy examples are included in the novel). After his most recent collection, February Fill-dyke, has appeared to scathing reviews, the very dejected Saturday realizes he quite possibly is in need of a new career.
Luckily, he’s offered the job of running a newly refurbished pub called the Downy Pelican, soon to become known as Poet’s Pub by its guests. Though it’s far from the civilized world of London, the pub (think small hotel) caters to wealthy visitors, especially Americans.
In addition to Saturday, “mine host,” the delectably quirky characters who people the novel i
nclude a learned professor (“who was famous in academic circles for his vigorous championship of the eighteenth century”) and his attractively intelligent daughter; a dubious but ravishing chambermaid named Nelly Bly, who just might be a Russian spy; Quentin, Saturday’s best friend and a novelist by trade, who assures Saturday that one can “always find human nature near to the surface in a pub, however expensive, and human nature is coarse enough for the most modern novelist”; an American entrepreneur, whose solemn face “looked a badly carved oak”; a suspiciously nonbookish book collector; a family of professional travelers, recently returned from Turkestan; a portrait painter named Angela Scrabster; a literary critic who despises Saturday’s poems; the critic’s wife; a long-distance sailor; a race-car adventurer; a mother/daughter theater-producing team; and Lady Porlet, “who had never written anything (for she had rheumatic finger-joints) and never read anything (for she had no brains) and never been out of England, for she had no interest in foreign parts.” Throw into this brew as well Holly, the pub’s bartender, whose greatest accomplishment is that he’s created a blue cocktail. (For eager imbibers there’s also a description of a little-known—but real—drink known as “lamb’s wool,” a favorite of Saturday’s.)
The destinies of all these characters intertwine over the course of the novel and culminate in one of the funniest car chases ever to be found in the pages of a novel. I will tell you only that it involves a charabanc, a buslike vehicle that one doesn’t usually associate with chases over hill and dale. (Coincidentally to the reissuing of Poet’s Pub, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that the lexicographers at Collins—publishers of a well-regarded dictionary—had declared that the word “charabanc” was in imminent danger of extinction: nobody was using it anymore. If this sad fact is not a call to read Poet’s Pub, and a not-so-subtle entreaty to make “charabanc” part of your everyday vocabulary, I don’t know what is.)
Eric Linklater was quite a prolific writer. Over his lifetime (1899–1974) he published almost two dozen works of fiction, including two books for children, as well as biographies and memoirs. These days his best-known work is probably not Poet’s Pub, which was his second novel, but rather his third, Juan in America, published in 1931, two years after Poet’s Pub. Reviewing this lively tale of the last years of Prohibition as seen through the eyes of a British traveler, Time magazine’s critic decreed that it provided “many an authentic bellylaugh.”
I suspect that the pleasure you’ll take from reading Poet’s Pub will not—quite honestly—involve belly laughs. This isn’t a slap-your-knee-and-chortle-loudly sort of book. If I’m not mistaken, however, you’ll find yourself chuckling sotto voce at least once or twice on each page. The joy in reading Poet’s Pub derives from Linklater’s ability to find humor in the quirks and foibles of human nature, as well as to write excruciatingly bad poetry on behalf of his main character.
I’ve now read Poet’s Pub four times between 1985 and 2011 and enjoyed it immensely each time. I hope you do, too.
NANCY PEARL
FOOL: If a man’s brains were in’s heels,
were’t not in danger of kibes?
LEAR: Ay, boy.
Poet’s Pub
CHAPTER I
The storm gathered and its thunder broke the fantastic idyll. The female centaur, ink-stained, with blown grey hair and the end of a cigarette in her mouth, faded like a Cheshire cat. The hunted poet Hylas stood up, weak as water because of the rape he had eluded, and vanished before his knees could knock again. The thunder became nearer, clearer, and increasingly wooden in tone. A square of daylight opened into the forest and made everything evident—the end of the bed, blue and grey jugs on the washstand, a crumpled coat, red toes that stood up from beneath the ruffled nether hem of a sheet.
Saturday Keith was awake.
“All right,” he shouted, and there was no more knocking.
“It’s eight o’clock,” said a female voice.
Not that it was a woman who wrote it, thought Keith. Women never write in the Literary Supplement; or at any rate no oftener than they preach from other pulpits. But I’ve never dreamt of anything so like a critic as that she-centaur. The engulfing female. The shy poet lost in a marsh of explanation. Centaur, censor, ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross. And I’m damned if “The Blue Scarf” is like the Boat Race.
He reached for his glasses and the crumpled copy of The Times Literary Supplement which lay on the floor at his bedside. He had reached Betterton the night before after walking thirty-two miles—which made a hundred and eight in four days—and found, with some trivial mail, three reviews of February Fill-dyke. Two of them were like the reviews of his first poems. The third was worse. He read it again.
“No serious poet can to-day afford to work without a theory.” (It sounds like an advertisement, he thought. Equip your library with our special rot-and-blot-proof theories. Warmly recommended by the leading poets. Easy payments arranged. You can earn while you learn.) “It is no longer enough to sing, no longer permissible to soar with beautiful and ineffectual wings into a luminous void. The poet must state, and what he states must be selected, significant and individual. It must have visible roots in actuality and growth in personal experience. Mr. Keith, indeed, realizes this—or appears to realize it—in such poems as ‘The Blue Scarf,’ where his long service with the Oxford University Boat Club finds an echo in lines which apparently reproduce the obedient rhythm of a crew with ears agape for the coach’s next remark.
‘Then through the wood the wind came with a shout,
And like blue wings her long blue scarf flew out,’
writes Mr. Keith, and we may pardonably think of such a couplet as the response to an injunction to ‘Give her ten’—though Mr. Keith exceeds his instructions and gives us twenty.”
He threw the paper away, viciously, and got out of bed to retrieve it. Because he had three times stroked a University crew to defeat they would never take him seriously. There had been a cartoon in the Daily Day the morning after his last race, in which three British heavyweight boxers, all well known for their habit of being knocked down, were shown writing him a congratulatory letter; dictating a message of sympathy from a prone position; telephoning, prostrate, an invitation to meet them. A photograph of him that made his face longer than it was, saddened beyond nature by horn-rimmed spectacles, had appeared in every illustrated paper beside the smiling, dentifrice-advertisement, curly-haired picture of the victorious Cambridge stroke. And now the critics were determined to perpetuate the memory of his Blue—the darkest Blue in history—in facetious comments on his poetry.
He looked at the review again. They had given him two-thirds of a column, which was generous, and the reviewer had praised a lyric beginning
“My love is young and very fair,
The sunlight will not leave her hair,
And in her lightly-laughing eyes
I see my own twin destinies.”—
which was illogical for a man who deprecated unaugmented singing. But his last remark hurt. He quoted a few lines:
“The earth was white and windless in the morning
Like Leda with her plumage spread for Jove,
And in the evening Jove went down the sky
In sunset gold to Danae,”
and added, “Mr. Keith is, as he always was, indomitable. But here he is bucketing badly and a long way from Mortlake—or Parnassus.”
It was for this that he had thrown up his job with Butterworth, Lackaday and Company, the Shippers, Brokers, Exporters, East India Merchants and God knew what. Butterworth and Lackaday collected Old Blues as other people collect Old Masters, and used them for their own ends. Saturday Keith had never been able to discover the precise nature of those ends—for he lacked the commercial instinct—and his two years in the City had seemed like two years among white mice in a revolving cage. He knew that Butterworth and Lackaday made money for themselves and some for their shareholders, and he realised that their business spread over all the
lines of communication of Britain’s commercial empire. He was willing to admit that their work was valuable to many different kinds of people. But he could not understand why they wanted Old Blues in their office, and he could not find an individual purpose in his own work there. It bored him and puzzled him. And when February Fill-dyke appeared he grew momentarily elated, for his publishers had done their work well, and told young Stephen Lackaday (who was hard and ageless and not really young) that he was leaving the firm.
“Why?” asked Lackaday.
“I don’t quite know,” said Keith, meaning that he didn’t quite know how to explain his reasons to such a successful man as Stephen Lackaday.
“You’re making a mistake. A man with a good athletic record, any man with a Rowing Blue, can do well in this house if he cares to pull his weight.”
“Damn my Rowing Blue,” said Keith. “I’m sorry. But I’ve made up my mind. Good-bye, Mr. Lackaday.”
“Good-bye,” said Stephen Lackaday.
Keith had then taken a train from Paddington to a station with a green-painted wooden fence and “Welcome” done in white letters on the opposite embankment. There he bought a toothbrush, wrote to his rooms asking that his letters should be forwarded to “The Feathers” at Betterton, and walked cheerfully towards three trees that stood by themselves on a round green hill. He walked seventeen miles the first day and bought a shirt, a collar, and a pair of socks. The next day he did thirty-four miles and bought another pair of socks; on the third day twenty-five miles and washed his original shirt (which he carried economically in his pocket); and on the fourth day thirty-two miles, arriving at “The Feathers” as the new moon disappeared behind it. He ate cold beef and five tomatoes, drank two bottles of beer, read his three reviews, a letter from his mother, and a telegram saying “Meet you at Betterton Friday—Quentin Cotton”; and went to bed with blistered feet and a dismal apprehension that he was a fool to write in private what men could rail at in public.