A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Ghosts, he declared (in his introduction to More Ghost Stories), should be ‘malevolent or odious,’ never amiable or helpful. The haunted should be ‘introduced in a placid way, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and in this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head.’ This may be the result, by accident or design, of long-buried secrets, setting retribution to work. Something of the kind seems almost a professional hazard for his visiting scholars and librarians. They have to face, also (in one of Monty’s own phrases), ‘the malice of inanimate objects,’ such objects as the wallpaper in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’ (who lives quietly with his aunt) and the sand-filled whistle in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”’ He speaks, too, of the rules of folklore, and says he has tried to make his ghosts act in ways ‘not inconsistent with them.’ One of the rules of folk stories is that the bad shall come to bad ends, and to this Monty was faithful. But the good (whose only failing may be that they have lived undisturbed so far) are rewarded rather unequally. Take, for example, what to my mind is the best story he ever wrote, ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.’ W.R.’s uncle has not been a wrongdoer, has no hideous secret like Mr Abney in ‘Lost Hearts,’ hasn’t disturbed any long-dead or made any rash experiments, or (most unwise of all) bought or borrowed any questionable old books. In W.R.’s dream of Punch and Judy there is ‘a sturdy figure clad in black and, as I thought, wearing bands: his head was covered with a whitish bag.’ This must be a projection of Uncle Henry, but Monty does not explain why he should be there, and seems to have come in this story as close as he ever did to compulsive writing, or being carried away. There is true inspiration in the names of the Punch and Judy men—Foresta & Calpigi, which change to Kidman & Gallop.

  How seriously did he take these stories? ‘I am told that they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers,’ he wrote. ‘If so, my whole object in writing them has been attained.’ It was his lifelong habit not to make too much of things. However, they were more than a diversion, they were a declaration of his position. From his schooldays onward he not only disliked but detested maths and science. In Eton and King’s he reduces both these subjects and their teachers to a stream of mildly satirical stories. ‘As a warning to scientists I must record how a question of mine, to which I really desired an answer, was met by [Mr Carpenter]. “Sir, what is the difference between a frog and a toad?” “Well, that’s perfectly simple; one’s Rana, and the other’s Bufo.” I am convinced that there must be a better solution than that.’ T. H. Huxley he referred to as ‘a coarse nineteenth-century stinks man.’ Mathematics he equated with suffering. He extended his disapproval, which was more like an intense physical reaction, to philosophy. When he was Dean of King’s he overheard two undergraduates disputing a problematic point, and, according to his colleague Nathaniel Wedd, he rapped on the table sharply with his pipe and called out: ‘No thinking, gentlemen, please!’ ‘Thought,’ Wedd notes in his unpublished memoirs, ‘really did disturb Monty throughout his life.’ What truly distressed him, however, was the division of King’s into the Pious and the Godless (Wedd himself, although an admirer of Monty’s, was an agnostic), while in the Cavendish Laboratory young physicists were at work—with cardboard and string, it was said—constructing new models of a world without God. It was, of course, not scientific accuracy Monty objected to—that was necessary to all scholarship—but a sense that mankind was occupying the wrong territory. In 1928, towards the end of his life, he spoke at Gresham’s School in defence of an education in the humanities as against ‘modern invention or the most intimate knowledge of things that have no soul.’

  ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”’ is the story which in literal fact is about a ‘sheeted ghost’—it has ‘a horrible, an intensely horrible face of crumpled linen.’ Its victim is Professor Parkins, said to be the Professor of Ontography, which I suppose makes him an expert on things as they are. He is certainly a scientist, ‘young, neat, and precise of speech,’ and emphatically a disbeliever, above all in ghosts. Disarmingly, Monty gives Parkins credit where it is due. He is ‘something of an old woman—rather hen-like, perhaps,’ but ‘dauntless and severe in his convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect.’ He is also the man who, after he has summoned his gruesome visitor, would either have fallen out of the window or lost his wits if help had not come. ‘There is nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear-cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered.’ So, faced by the obstinate disbeliever, Monty takes his not-so-mild revenge.

  From the Penguin edition, 2000

  THE WORLD OF PUNCH

  Thin, Fat, and Crazy

  The Death of Punch

  When Punch, a year ago, gave an elaborate-sounding party for its 150th anniversary, I didn’t go, feeling that the celebrations were unfortunately out of place. This year, 1992, the tough little paper has quietly given up publication. I rang up the offices to ask what was going to become of the Table round which the editorial staff had sat, for a century and a half, to decide on the week’s political cartoons—the Mahogany Tree, as Thackeray called it, although it’s really made of deal, and on which generations of staffers have carved their names. What would become of it? They didn’t know. It was as though they had been stunned by an expected, rather than an unexpected, blow. And in fact the death of a humorous paper is a serious thing.

  My father, E. V. Knox, was the editor of Punch from 1932 to 1949. His connection with the paper started long before that. His first contribution (not accepted) was sent in four years after the death of Queen Victoria. At that time he was a poet, indeed he always remained one, but he was too diffident ever to say much about it. He admired A. E. Housman, and in particular a seemingly effortless couplet like

  I, a stranger and afraid,

  In a world I never made.

  He admired G. K. Chesterton and R. L. Stevenson, and he very much admired Mark Twain. Meanwhile, he went up to London from Birmingham, in the industrial Midlands, as a young man determined to earn a living, at a time when one of a writer’s highest ambitions was to get something into Punch. A joke was said either to be, or not to be, ‘good enough for Punch.’ Once in, it was repeated and admired as the paper circulated out to the limits of then British colonies. Arriving by sea several weeks later it was ready to be appreciated again. Durability was essential to a joke in those days. Of course it might well have been produced, as my father’s certainly were, by an almost desperate young man in lodgings who polished his boots every morning in order to be smart enough to call on London’s editors.

  I would like to take a look at two of my father’s remarks—or rather asides, for everything that was of real importance to him he said as an aside:

  1. ‘What is the difference between journalism and literature? None, except that journalism is paid, and literature is not.’ Here, like a true professional, he is speaking up for his trade, but he is also defending, I think, the concept of lightness—‘light verse’ in particular. This kind of verse, which was a speciality of Punch, and at which he himself excelled, is often the last resort for subjects that have got beyond rational comment. It struck my father, as it struck a good many others, that the world was increasingly ruled by misguided people, in that they no longer seemed able to create a system that benefited even themselves. They could only be appropriately described in light verse.

  2. He once said that humorists, if it was necessary to understand them at all, could be divided into fat men and thin men, although they could on occasion take each other’s parts. Thin men are, of course, dangerous, and they are resentful, indignant, clear-sighted, possibly savage. They either have less (or more to suffer) than others, or remember what it is to have less, or can identify with those who have less. Ovid, Villon’s Testaments, Gulliver’s Travels, Mansfield Park, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Catcher in the Rye are thin persons’ books.
Fat men are genial, expansive, company-loving, seem to make the sun shine simply by coming into a room, and so forth. Horace, irrespective of his personal appearance and his personal situation, was a fat man. Barchester Towers, Diary of a Nobody, Carry On, Jeeves, Lake Wobegon Days are fat men’s books, providing, as thin men’s books don’t, consolation.

  During the eighteenth century, a third kind of comic genius arrived, the fantasist. ‘She went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. “What, no soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber.’ This was part of a monologue by Samuel Foote (1720—1777), who liked to give oneman performances because they cost him almost nothing. He defied anyone else to memorize ‘She went into the garden.’ But it was not nonsense, it was free association, and so, on a grand scale, was Tristram Shandy. Beyond this, Sterne claimed to have a philosophical backing for his novel, that is, Locke’s claim that the mind’s association of ideas is based on something other than reason. As Freud put it, ‘it is easier to mix up things than to distinguish them, and it is particularly easy to travel over modes of reasoning unsanctified by logic.’ Possibly easier, and certainly more amusing.

  There you have it, then. Humorists are either thin, fat, or crazy. And yet Thackeray, one of the earliest of Punch’s contributors, wrote that ‘the humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness; your scorn of untruth, pretension, imposture; your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost.’ And this, also, is true.

  Punch started out in 1841 in rather confused circumstances—there were several other journals with the same name—but most emphatically as a ‘thin’ paper. It was violently radical, campaigned against capital punishment, prostitution, slums, and the brutishness of Members of Parliament, attacked the Prince Consort, named names, and joked recklessly about Jack Ketch, the hangman, and the suicides from Waterloo Bridge. The cover design was settled only after a few hits and misses. It was by Richard Doyle (who later left the paper because as a Catholic he could not stomach the violent attacks on the Pope) and showed the figure of Mr Punch leering disreputably and somewhat the worse for drink. Toby sits beside him, sunk in the true Toby-dog’s melancholy. Punch’s followers are from the procession in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne in London’s National Gallery; they are supposed to have fled to his protection from the Gallery’s incompetent picture-restorers. This cover appeared, with only minor modifications, every week until the 1950s, and when, largely at the insistence of bookstall managers, it was abandoned, Punch’s fortunes departed with it. The paper’s finances were precarious—Mark Lemon, one of the original editors, had to write and sell farces to meet the weekly printing bills and the early statement of aims was pitched pretty low—much lower, for instance, than Ross’s in the first number of The New Yorker, which offered to ‘present the truth and the whole truth without fear or favor.’ Punch’s writers were all anonymous, the editor’s name was never listed, and the tone was wonderfully convivial and uncompromisingly ‘low’—what was then called a ‘chop-house’ or ‘pot-house atmosphere.’ But from the start Punch was ferociously political, and at the height of its influence could be seen, in celebrated cartoons, reproving Gladstone and Disraeli (shown as two tiresome schoolboys) for throwing mud at each other, or riding onto the battlefield to reproach Napoleon III. In a casual and very characteristic way, the paper, which had been expected to last only a few years, acquired power without ever meaning to.

  The subjects of the cartoons were settled—and continued to be settled, as far as I know, to the very end—at a weekly dinner, which later became lunch, round the Punch table. In May 1859, after Disraeli had presented his Reform Bill to the House of Commons, ‘we begin discussing politics even before the venison…Thackeray thinks of workmen coming among gentlemen of Parliament and asking “What have you done for me?”’

  Of course, the riotous staff of the early days had never given up their right to turn serious at the appropriate moment. That was always understood, even though Mark Lemon had announced the first issue as ‘an asylum for the thousands of orphan jokes now wandering about without so much as a shelf to rest upon.’ No editor ever made a decision comparable with Ross’s when he allocated a whole number to John Hersey’s report on Hiroshima, but in 1843 (in the Christmas number) Lemon printed Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt. Hood sent it in rather diffidently, saying it could be thrown away if not wanted. But Punch did want it, and the ballad of the South London seamstress who got five farthings a shirt, out of which she had to find her own needles, was translated into every language in Europe. The circulation of Punch tripled. Hood was gratified, but was obliged to point out that he was dying. Death’s door, he said, had opened so wide that he could distinctly hear its hinges creak.

  Punch, at this point, had the chance of turning into the English Simplissimus or Krokodil, a risk-taking satirical weekly in the European mode. But by the 1860s it had grown less political, and, under Thackeray’s influence, much less radical. On the other hand, it acquired a succession of fine black-and-white artists—John Leech, Charles Keene, George du Maurier, Linley Sambourne, Phil May—who turned the mid—and late-Victorian Punch into a superb journal of record. As a small girl I used to sit on rainy afternoons in the corner of the dining room, where the old bound volumes of Punch were kept, turning the pages and entering, without needing to understand, the quite different worlds of Keene and du Maurier. Keene, the greatest genius of them all, drew London, Paris and Scotland exactly as he saw them. As Forrest Reid puts it in his Illustrators of the Eighteen-Sixties, ‘he left nothing to chance…If he wanted to draw a typewriter or an old boot he procured his original; if he wanted a turnip field for a background, out he tramped into the country till he found one. Frequently he made use of himself as a model, keeping a large mirror in his studio for the purpose—a habit not without its drawbacks, as the trousers of some of his “swells” bear witness.’ It’s true that you hardly ever find a pair of unwrinkled trousers in Keene. His is a world of drunks and railway porters and cabdrivers (also often drunk, and almost always abusive), of umbrellas glistening in wet streets, snug firesides, and stout wives. With du Maurier, on the other hand, you are with the Duchesses, in drawing rooms and concert halls, surrounded by the absurd musicians and artists they patronize and the yet more absurd nouveaux riches who are gently but decisively put in their place. ‘I have generally stuck to the “classes” because Keene seem s to have monopolised the “masses,”’ du Maurier said, but in any case he conducted a lifelong romance with a half-imaginary English aristocracy, improbably tall and elegant, with drooping moustaches and casual male strength corresponding to womanly beauty, dark or blonde, inherited from numerous generations. To Henry James it seemed that Keene expressed himself in terms of ugliness, and du Maurier in terms of beauty. I don’t quite know what he meant by this. The lights and shades of Keene’s umbrellas and bony cab horses are surely beautiful, if the quality of the drawing is to count for anything at all.

  But are the jokes funny? Punch, after all, can’t be judged entirely by its contribution to social and political history. The usual answer, I think, would be that the jokes themselves have become a joke. There are too many words, too much explanation, and too many comments by the artist (‘collapse of stout party’ was one of Keene’s). Here is one of du Maurier’s, for 31 March 1883. The scene is a musical soirée, where the young ladies will shortly be asked to sing at the piano.

  DANGERS OF INDISCRIMINATE PRAISE

  (A CAUTION TO MOTHERS)

  MRS TOMLINSON (to extremely eligible young lady): ‘I’M SURE YOU’LL LIKE MY SON RICHARD, MY DEAR MISS GOLDMORE; NOT THAT HE’S EXACTLY BRILLIANT, YOU KNOW, BUT HE’S SO STEADY AND GOOD. SPENDS ALL HIS EVENINGS AT HOME, AND ALWAYS IN BED BY ELEVEN! HE’S NEVER GIVEN ME AN HOUR’S UNEASINESS I
N HIS LIFE!’

  ‘GOOD GRACIOUS!’ EXCLAIMS MISS GOLDMORE, AND INSTANTLY CONCEIVES FOR RICHARD A FRANTIC AVERSION. (Which is not lessened when she discovers that he’s that modest youth in the background, pulling on his gloves.)

  This directs us to the background of the picture, where we can see the modest youth, who probably shouldn’t be pulling on his gloves, since the other men don’t seem to be wearing them, and we can see too that he is short and stout, crimes in the eyes of du Maurier. Du Maurier called his text, with its stage directions at the end, his ‘scrawl.’

  Some of the scrawls, of course, take much longer to get to the point. ‘Indiscriminate Praise’ is a fair average. But the fact is that these are not jokes at all, but what the nineteenth century thought of as ‘good things,’ that is scenes or moments which, like James Joyce’s epiphanies, express, when they’re successful, an entire relationship or even an entire lifetime. One of the last of them, and perhaps the best loved of all, appeared in October 1906. It was by Gunning King, an artist who modelled himself on Charles Keene—a drawing of an old woman sitting by the fire. ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again, sometimes I just sits.’ All the resignation of old age and natural exhaustion are in the words and the picture.

  The last great Victorian editor of Punch was Francis Burnand, who accepted ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks’ and (as a serial) The Diary of a Nobody. Burnand lived at Ramsgate, on the coast, and when he came up to the Punch offices at 10 Bouverie Street, the staff knew he had arrived from the loud thud as he took off his boots and threw them into the passage. As the new century advanced Burnand (who had been Sullivan’s librettist before Gilbert appeared) perhaps recognized himself as out of place. In 1906 his efficient deputy editor, Owen Seaman, took over. Seaman was a good organizer, a skilled writer of verse, and a dignified man of the world who knew everyone and went everywhere. His one weakness was the (in his own view) guilty secret that his family had been ‘in trade’—his father had been a ladies’ haberdasher. The fact that this should have weighed so heavily with Seaman (later Sir Owen) is an ominous sign of the stifling respectability that gradually overtook the paper. Punch after the First World War became not only conservative but a conservative institution. What it offered its still-faithful readers was not so much humour (for Seaman believed humour should be taken seriously) as whimsicality and the killing sayings of young children. This meant, however, that he welcomed the Christopher Robin poems, although he could never get on personally with A. A. Milne, considering him a dangerous radical.