Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

  In a Sieve they went to sea:

  In spite of all their friends could say,

  On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,

  In a Sieve they went to sea!

  And when the Sieve turned round and round,

  And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’

  They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,

  But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!

  In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’

  The Jumblies have no counterpart in nature, but they are marvellously persuasive. (‘The Jumblies’, Lear said to Emma Parkyns, who loved the book, ‘I believe with you, are real critters.’) Lear makes them real by garlanding them with details, like their purchases in the Western Seas – an owl and a useful cart, some rice and a cranberry tart, and a hive of silvery bees:

  And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,

  And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,

  And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,

  And no end of Stilton Cheese.

  Drinking their Ring-Bo-Ree they never age: they return in ‘twenty years or more’, to the envy of all who hear their tales. As T. S. Eliot said, this is ‘a poem of adventure and of nostalgia for the romance of foreign voyage and exploration’, but only Lear could map these uncharted lands: the Gromboolian plain, the Torrible Zone, and the hills of the Chankly Bore.

  When the poems shift from distant seas to domestic shores the desire for flight becomes more urgent still. The Nutcracker and the Sugartongs, fed up with their stupid existence, ‘So idle and weary, so full of remorse’, ride off on their stolen horses to a chorus of yelling and clattering and lady-like/ladle-like squeaks:

  The Cups and the Saucers danced madly about,

  The Plates and the Dishes looked out of the casement,

  The Salt-cellar stood on his head with a shout,

  The Spoons with a clatter looked out of the lattice,

  The Mustard-pot climbed up the Gooseberry Pies,

  The Soup-ladle peered through a heap of veal Patties,

  And squeaked with a ladle-like scream of surprise.

  These household things leap with clanging, hysterical life, imbued with the excitement that Lear felt when routines turned to chaos: the fire at Knowsley or the flood at Oatlands. But as the escapees flee, the tone changes and quietens:

  They galloped away to the beautiful shore;

  In silence they rode, and ‘made no observation’,

  Save this: ‘We will never go back any more!’

  With a final snap, like a vanishing act on the page, they ride out of hearing, ‘Till far in the distance their forms disappearing,/ They faded away. – And they never came back!’ We cannot follow them. Like the singer of ‘Calico Pie’, we are left behind – and they never come back.

  If flight is the main imperative, sometimes, Lear suggests – if less convincingly – contentment can be bounded by a nest. His ‘Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow’ solve their headaches and lack of hats and slippers by dashing to Moses’ wholesale shop, to buy a hat and bonnet ‘and a gown with spots upon it’.

  Then when so completely drest,

  Back they flew, and reached their nest.

  Their children cried, ‘O Ma and Pa!

  How truly beautiful you are!’

  Said they, ‘We trust that cold or pain

  We shall never feel again!

  While, perched on tree, or house, or steeple,

  We now shall look like other people.

  Witchy witchy witchy wee,

  Twikky mikky bikky bee,

  Zikky sikky tee!’

  Might staying put in respectable comfort, ‘like other people’, yet sticking to your own nonsensical song, be happiness, of a sort? Perhaps, but the two domestic poems that follow – the quarrelsome courtships of ‘The Broom, the Shovel, the Poker and the Tongs’ and ‘The Table and the Chair’, undercut this idea. The impatience to move is clear when the furniture with ‘legs’ try to walk:

  Said the Chair unto the Table,

  ‘Now you know we are not able!

  How foolishly you talk,

  When you know we cannot walk!’

  Said the Table with a sigh,

  ‘It can do no harm to try,

  I’ve as many legs as you,

  Why can’t we walk on two?’

  They do toddle off, with a cheerful bumpy sound, only to get lost ‘in going down an alley,/ To a castle in the valley’. Sometimes, Lear implies, we need rescuing, bringing back. Travelling safely home is as vital as escaping, and perhaps more difficult.

  *

  Nonsense Songs, which Lear never asked to be taken seriously, showed him to be a lyrical poet whose metres were as varied as those of his hero Tennyson, and whose moods could embrace yearning sadness as well as wit. A lifetime of listening, reading, parodying, writing and singing lay behind his musical use of intricate scansion and rhyme. The poems moved like dances, their rhythms ranging from the slow, three-beat ballad-waltz of the Owl and the Pussy-cat – ‘They sailed away for a year and a day’ – to the simple four/three of ‘Mr Daddy Long-legs’ and the hand-holding, foot-stamping chant of the Jumblies’ choral dance:

  Far and few, far and few,

  Are the lands where the Jumblies live:

  Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

  And they went to sea in a Sieve.

  His subjects were as varied and alive as his verse. Into the slim volume in its dark blue binding, Lear crowded a host of creatures, animate, inanimate, real and imaginary. In poems and stories and alphabets he gathered flocks of birds, swarms of insects, shoals of Fizziggious Fish, an aquarium of reptiles and crustaceans and an army of animals. With them marched mundane things: cakes and ink-pots, dolls, hats and kites. Around them, in his botany, grew nonsense plants with formal names.

  The land of Bosh was crowded, alive, overflowing. Yet it had room for more. As soon as Nonsense Songs was published in December 1871 he was writing new poems, ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ and ‘Mr and Mrs Discobbolos’, which he copied out on Christmas Eve. Here too, in bravura style, he explored the complexities of love and marriage and the perils of staying still and of taking flight. For Mr and Mrs Discobbolos – people-creatures, strange but human – married life is precarious. Their name echoes that of the Discobolos, the lost Greek bronze of the javelin thrower, and they aim high. They climb up, as so many Lear figures do:

  Mr and Mrs Discobbolos

  Climbed to the top of a wall,

  And they sate to watch the sunset sky

  And to hear the Nupiter Piffkin cry

  And the Biscuit Buffalo call.

  They took up a roll and some Camomile tea

  And both were as happy as happy could be –

  Till Mrs Discobbolos said –

  ‘Oh! W! X! Y! Z!

  It has just come into my head –

  Suppose we should happen to fall!!!!!

  Darling Mr Discobbolos!’

  It is never safe, with Lear, to say ‘happy as happy could be’. Terror lies in the threat of falling, of breaking into pieces like the final, separate letters of the alphabet that form the refrain. One answer is simply to stay there, above the worry of life and household cares: from on high they see no trouble ahead, no ‘Sorrow or any such thing’. But we feel the risk.

  If Lear sighed for wall-top bliss, watching the sunset sky, he also remembered the loss of the dream. He kept in touch with Gussie, underlining the arrival of her letters in his diary, ‘very sweet & good & dear little Gussie. – She is as good as good can be & we two ought to have been one, but can’t be ever.’ At a low point in the autumn of 1870 he plunged into self-pity:

  I work without hope or heart, & am as depressed & wretched as at Corfu in 1855 – nay – more so, for then I had more hope, – now, alas, more experience instead – I see no loophole of light onward, ‘tears, idle tears’ are in my eyes – tho far fro
m happy autumn fields. Ah! Gussie – But to look back is worse folly than any other – ‘I must be alone – until I die’.

  Yet rejection, as he knew from his own mixture of pain and relief when he left Hinton, could also feel like escape. The opening of ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ has a lyrical serenity but its folksong simplicity masks a poetic form of elaborate complexity, mirroring the depth of feeling. When Mr Bò, with his tiny body and big head and nursery-rhyme furniture – ‘Two old chairs and half a candle – / One old jug without a handle’ – comes across Lady Jingly Jones his loneliness and longing meet.

  ‘Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!

  Sitting where the pumpkins blow,

  Will you come and be my wife?’

  Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

  ‘I am tired of living singly, –

  On this coast so wild and shingly, –

  I’m a-weary of my life.’

  He offers her practical things – prawns and fish, plentiful and cheap – but also a simple avowal worthy of Burns, ‘As the sea, my love is deep!’ (It’s not clear which he feels is the most persuasive appeal.) It is no good, she weeps, he is too late – she is married already: ‘his name is Handel/ Handel Jones, Esquire & Co.’ If Mr Jones sounds more like a firm than a man, this is half the point. He belongs to the bourgeois life of ‘they’, and it is this that has blocked their romance.

  The only option, as Lear himself felt, is to travel. And when Mr Bò flees on his large and lively turtle Lear quickens the pace allegro vivace, then slows it again on the tide:

  Through the silent-roaring ocean

  Did the Turtle swiftly go;

  Holding fast upon his shell

  Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

  With a sad primaeval motion

  Towards the sunset isles of Boshen

  Still the Turtle bore him well.

  Holding fast upon his shell

  ‘Lady Jingly Jones, farewell!’

  Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,

  Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

  The currents sweep him westwards to the isles of Boshen, where the refuge of ‘Bosh’, or nonsense, becomes the Hesperides, home of the blest. Lady Jingly Jones is left to sob alone.

  From the Coast of Coromandel,

  Did that Lady never go;

  On that heap of stones she mourns

  For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

  With that negative, ‘never go’, the poet condemns her. She is left on the shingly coast, trapped like Mariana or the Lady of Shalott, mourning a love denied consummation, a marriage that can never be.

  *

  Robert Bush was right to persuade Lear to leave his hundred new limericks for a second book, but when they were published at the end of 1872, in More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany Etc., it was clear that the mystery of the songs coloured the limericks too.

  There was a young lady in white,

  Who looked out at the depths of the night;

  But the birds of the air, filled her heart with despair,

  And oppressed that young lady in white.

  Darkness crowds in on a ghostly figure stretching from a window to greet shadowy owls. The owls are not accusatory, but sympathetic, understanding. Despite her despair she looks into their eyes and her face reflects theirs – she looks as though she wants to join them, suspended, floating into the dark. In a note scribbled on his drawing,

  Lear said that he did not mind how the printer did the black, ‘so long as you keep the figure quite white & the birds grey’. Lear was an intelligent, self-aware depressive. Excitement ripples through his response to wide vistas, brilliant light, the great flight of birds. But he was easily knocked down and as he grew older the lows lasted longer than the highs. The triggers were darkness, cold, noisy crowds, loss of intimacy, memories of happiness lost. Abandonment, perhaps instilled by his childhood rejection, was the worst of his fears. Very early, he found a voice for this sense of loss in the Romantic poets, a mood he found again in Tennyson, another post-Romantic melancholic. Knowing his propensity for ‘my distressing dark moods’, Lear was also brave. He commanded himself: ‘The morbids are not allowed!’ He tried to drag himself out of the pit. Work helped, walking helped, going out and seeing people helped, playing the piano helped – but sometimes not. He charted the course of his depressions baldly in his diary. All dissenting children were advised to keep a journal to record their self-improvement and lapses and often, as with Lear, these turned into a personal rather than religious record. Instead of struggles with the devil, Lear had his epilepsy, ‘the Demon’; instead of meditations on death, he had death-like despair, ‘the morbids’. He recorded moods, health, toothache, itchy skin, constipation; work and travel; people met, letters received, gossip heard; walks taken, books read, meals eaten.

  What did he not record? Dreams, lusts, his feelings about words, his creative process – all these lie deep beneath the diary-words. But when his mind was ‘off-duty’, when he was writing nonsense to entertain or let off steam, fears and desires sometimes streamed up through the cracks into the light: ‘Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils,’ he wrote. In his limericks and songs, Lear wrote about his moods obliquely. More unusually, he drew them. He drew his longing to fly high, and those moments of ecstasy when one feels one can catch the moon.

  There was an Old Person of Tring,

  Who embellished his nose with a ring;

  He gazed at the moon, every evening in June,

  That ecstatic Old Person of Tring.

  He drew, too, the fear of sinking, of drowning, of being like a jellyfish, joining the fishes, a shapeless creature in the depth.

  There was an Old Person of Ems,

  Who casually fell in the Thames;

  And when he was found, they said he was drowned,

  That unlucky Old Person of Ems.

  (‘Casually’ is a key word for Lear, with its hidden root of falling, cadere, its sense of absent-mindedness and its hint of a nonsense opposite, ‘causally’.) Many drawings evoke common words for mental and emotional collapse, words that actually make good therapeutic sense, describing what people feel is happening to them: ‘under water’, ‘breakdown’, ‘going to pieces’, being ‘in bits’; and words for the fight to recover, ‘pull myself together’, ‘make something of myself’. Lear drew the fragmented self and its attempted, often unsuccessful, reconstruction in Humpty Dumpty, in the Old Man of Nepaul, in the story of the Polly and the Puseybite. He also drew the depressive’s urge to hide away, or to curl up. In More Nonsense many people hide their true selves, as their creator did, choosing not to face the world:

  There was an Old Man of Hong Kong,

  Who never did anything wrong;

  He lay on his back, with his head in a sack,

  That innocuous Old Man of Hong Kong.

  In one drawing, in a letter to Evelyn Baring, written in a week of dreadful weather, Lear’s own monogram became a person, coiled up in himself. ‘Generally speaking’, he wrote, ‘I have been wrapped up like this all the week in a wholly abject and incapable state.’

  At the end of the 1860s, exhausted by the Corsican book, humiliated by affairs with Gussie, embarrassed by his confused, divided self, Lear felt more of an idiot than an inspired fool. He winced and pulled himself up, building his new house, writing his poems and reminding himself that he was known as an artist, a traveller and a writer, and that he was also loved for his nonsense. He enjoyed telling the story of a railway journey when he shared a carriage with two women who were reading the 1861 Book of Nonsense to children and he overheard a ‘globular’ gentleman explain that ‘thousands of families were grateful to the author’, who was really Edward, Lord Derby, as the author’s name was an anagram of ‘Edward Earl’. Outraged, Lear burst out that he was ‘the painter & Author’, only to be told that ‘“There is no such person as Edward Lear” “But” – says I “there is – & I am the man – & I wrote the book”.’ When they laughed, he showed the name in his hat, on his card and
his handkerchief and left the amazed travellers ‘to gnash their teeth in trouble & tumult’.

  When he drew the scene he took pains to show himself as ‘real’, and the doubter as the cartoon man. But even so he could only identify this fragile self, the ‘no such person’, by bits and pieces: hat, handkerchief, visiting card.

  Lear’s new limericks were full of familiar mishaps and violence – a mother beating daughters, an uncle fanning the head off his smiling niece – but in this book ‘they’ retreated somewhat from the assaults and frantic remonstrances of 1861. They bring the odd Persons hats to sit on, they sing ballads to soothe them, they are ‘dazzled’ by the Young Person of Ayr and ‘entranced’ when the Old Man of Skye does his waltz with the fly. When baffled, they ask meekly for explanations, only to be met by a matching incomprehension, or a stubborn silence:

  There was an Old Person of Deal,

  Who, in walking used only his heel;

  When they said, ‘Tell us why?’ – he made no reply;