by T. S. Eliot
5
A spotless knight without reproach or blame
In Cheapside, Lothbury or Barbican,
How can you do it? Answer now: how can
You be so lost to dignity and shame
As caper to the rhythm known as “swing,”
10
And dance to the lubricious saxophone,
And sway your hips to the barbaric drum?
[Textual History II 242]
Can such things be? O death where is thy sting,
When drunken Muses on the banjo strum,
And pipe to negro ditties of no tone?
FABER! of thy great exploits ’twas not least,
That thou ofttimes didst twist the mighty tail
(Alone thou didst it) of the basking whale
And tamed with words the elephantine beast,
5
And (what were minor trophies for thy feast)
Slew the wild albatross, the penguin pale,
And the white liddell hart in coat of mail,
And the sly cat of Bina Gardens fleec’d;
Great hunter! whose past glories we dissect,
10
To what decay’d estate art thou now come,
Ensiren’d by the Cotton Club bassoon,
Enchanted by the Broadway dialect,
And, masticating Wrigley’s pepsin gum,
Expectoratest in the loud spittoon.
Title Three Sonnets: many of Geoffrey Faber’s own poems, including one in Noctes, were sonnets.
[I]
1 GEOFFREY! who: Milton: “Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings”, sonnet, On the Lord General Fairfax. (Wordsworth took up the exclamatory opening in “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: | England hath need of thee”, Sonnet.)
3 The Victor’s laurels and the prophet’s Cape: “Mr. Victor Gollancz & Mr. Jonathan Cape, two famous publishers of London”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1. Geoffrey Faber joined the council of the Publishers’ Association in 1934 (Treasurer, 1937; President, 1939).
8 the Trade: OED 6a: “spec. the publishers and booksellers”. Bath and Hove: genteel retirement towns.
9 crooning like a Harlem coon: ragtime “coon songs” were named after All Coons Look Alike to Me (1890) by the black performer Ernest Hogan, about a “dusky maiden” torn between two handsome men.
10 Ruth amid the alien corn: Keats: “Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, | She stood in tears amid the alien corn”, Ode to a Nightingale 66–67.
[Textual History II 242]
12 worse and worse: see note to “Wux and Wux” in letter to Bonamy Dobrée, 10 May 1927, in “Improper Rhymes”.
13–14 Like Lucifer he falls: from dewy morn | To noon: Henry VIII III ii: “And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer.” Paradise Lost I 742–43: “from Morn | To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve”.
[II]
1 variant soldier’s oaths: As You Like It II vii: “Then a soldier, | Full of strange oaths”.
1–2 Cust · · · Brownlow: Faber was descended from Sir Richard Cust (1680–1734), who married Anne, elder daughter of Sir William Brownlow, MP. The Brownlow barony, in Lincolnshire, was created in 1776 for Sir Brownlow Cust.
3 more than man: LADY MACBETH: “When you durst do it, then you were a man; | And, to be more than what you were, you would | Be so much more than man” (I vii).
3–6 Captain or Colonel · · · protector · · · knight · · · Barbican: Milton: “Captain or colonel, or knight in arms · · · him within protect”, Sonnet VIII. When the assault was intended to the City (TSE’s Cheapside and Lothbury are streets in the City of London, and the Barbican was a fortified area in the City in Roman times). Colonel: trisyllabic until late in the 17th century (“coronelle”).
4 Gallant protector of the oppressed dame: the marriage of Geoffrey and Enid Faber contrasted with that of Geraint and the oppressed Enid in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
5 A spotless knight without reproach or blame: “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche”, 16th-century description of Pierre Bayard. Chaucer: “He was a verray parfit gentil knight”, The Canterbury Tales Prologue 72.
5–6 without reproach or blame | In Cheapside: Middleton (title): A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Cheapside, Lothbury: for Wordsworth, see note to Mr. Pugstyles 26–28.
9–14 caper to the rhythm · · · ditties of no tone: TSE took the opposite tack in his facetious letter to Geoffrey Faber, 7–8 July 1936 (see note to The O’Possum Strikes Back 4): “I may find myself tempted to devote the whole of my attention to the legitimate entertainment industry, providing innocent and rhythmical pleasure for people’s bodies, instead of conniving at providing so much trash for their minds.”
9 “swing”: Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing (if it ain’t got that swing) had been a hit in 1932.
9–10 As caper to the rhythm known as “swing,” | And dance to the lubricious saxophone: Richard III I i, RICHARD: “He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber, | To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.”
12 Can such things be: MACBETH: “Can such things be | And overcome us like a summer’s cloud?” (III iv). O death where is thy sting: 1 Corinthians 15: 55.
13 drunken Muses: Pope: “Is there a Parson, much be-mus’d in Beer, | A maudlin Poetess, a rhyming Peer”, An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 15–16 (for a previous use by TSE, see note to WLComposite 286, 291).
[Textual History II 242]
14 And pipe to negro ditties of no tone: Keats: “Not to the sensual ear · · · Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone”, Ode on a Grecian Urn 13–14. TSE: “Here’s a negro (teeth and smile) | Has a dance that’s quite worthwhile”, The smoke that gathers blue and sinks 20–21.
[III]
3 Alone thou didst it: CORIOLANUS V vi: “like an eagle in a dove-cote, I | Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles. | Alone I did it.”
6 the wild albatross, the penguin pale: “The ‘Albatross’ & ‘Penguin’ cheapjack books”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1. (Albatross Books were the first mass-market paperbacks.)
7 the white liddell hart: “Capt. Liddell Hart, a military historian”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1. TSE: “The white hart behind a white well”, Landscapes III. Usk 3.
8 sly cat of Bina Gardens: “Mr. H. then residing in Bina gardens S.W.5”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1.
9 Great hunter: Genesis 10: 9: “Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord”. Faber enjoyed shooting and fishing on his Welsh estate.
9 glories (variant: grandeur): Poe: “To the glory that was Greece | And the grandeur that was Rome”, To Helen.
9–10 we dissect, | To: Wordsworth: “we murder to dissect”, The Tables Turned 23.
10 decay’d estate: 1 Maccabees 3: 43: “Let us restore the decayed estate of our people”.
11 Cotton Club: “A famed negro club in New York City”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1. bassoon: a jazz rarity at this period.
11–14 bassoon · · · loud spittoon: Coleridge: “The Wedding-Guest now beat his breast, | For he heard the loud bassoon”, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner I 31–32.
13 Wrigley’s pepsin gum: chewing gun sold as a digestive aid.
14 Expectoratest in the loud spittoon: Fowler (1926): expectorate “seems to be now the established American for spit · · · an object-lesson on the vanity of genteelism. The mealy-mouthed American must be by this time harder put to it with expectorate than the mealy-mouthed Englishman with spit; his genteelism has outgrown its gentility & become itself the plain rude word for the rude thing.”
————
Not included in the present edition: Frognal: A Pindarick Ode by John Hayward.
[Textual History II 242]
Vers pour la Foulque
Feuillet d’Album
Allons nous promener, si tu veux.
Nous allons diriger nos pas
Du côté de chez Bina:
Cherchons le numéro vingt-deux.
5
N’as-tu pas vu, que c’est grotesque,
>
Ce paysage aux plates-bandes ternes?
C’est un pays de balivernes!
Il n’est pas lieu moins pittoresque.
Le facteur même grince des dents
10
Et prend un aspect plus farouche
En passant par ce quartier louche—
Un faubourg des moins alléchants.
C’est un pays de bambochades,
Où par des portiques de Willett
15
Des boniches insolentes vous guettent
En attendant vos sérénades.
Peu de vivant qui se remue—
Un terrain vague et désolé:
On voit des chats avariés,
20
Et même parfois une ancienne grue.
Mais derrière une vaste fenêtre
Où s’étale un vase de nénuphars,
Ecoute! des chuchotements épars
Et des rires fous. C’est lui! l’être
25
Immonde! c’est la Tarentule
Aux yeux multiples, au vénin sur,
Qui nous fait, d’un regard impur,
Un geste que le strabisme annule.
[Textual History II 243]
Allons nous promener, si tu veux;
30
Nous allons filer droit jusqu’à
Ces chétifs jardins de Bina:
Cherchons le numéro vingt-deux.
Nous allons nous donner la peine
De nous soulager—et sonner;
35
Laissons nos culs se ventiler
En attendant la Madeleine.
This appears to be the only one of the poems from Noctes Binanianæ that TSE contemplated printing in a different context. On 3 Dec 1945 he wrote to Pierre Leyris, who was preparing a volume of French translations of TSE’s earlier poems: “I think the best title would probably be La Terre Gaste, précédé de quelques poèmes anciens [The Waste Land preceded by some old poems]. Only if you put in the French poem that John Hayward had [Vers pour la Foulque from Noctes Binanianæ], that dates from 1938 and therefore ancient hardly applies. But that is I think, the only one of the French poems which I would like to have included. I do not think that the others [from Poems (1920)] are good enough to take their place in such a small selection as this. You are quite at liberty to use that poem only I cannot provide you with a copy of it at the moment as the only copy I have is buried somewhere in a box of books, but I daresay Hayward would be very glad to type out a copy for you. It would need a few notes for which I could supply the material.”
1 Allons nous promener, si tu veux: “Let us go then, you and I”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1.
4 numéro vingt-deux: “The residence of Mr. H.”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1.
12 faubourg: to Hayward, 6 Sept 1939, on the blackout: “The darkness is rather pleasant in districts that you know like the palm of your hand, but terrifying in unfamiliar faubourgs.”
14 Willett: “Wm. Willett (temp. XIX cent) creator of ‘Pont St. Dutch’ ‘Etruscan Tudor’”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1. The architect built Bina Gardens in 1884–86. “Pont Street Dutch” was John Betjeman’s description of the style of London’s late Victorian brick mansion blocks. “Etruscan Tudor” was Hayward’s own term, as when he wrote to William Empson on 26 Mar 1939: “I made up my mind to leave my Etruscan-Tudor bed-sitting room in Earl’s Court after the Munich Crisis”.
36 la Madeleine: “One Magdalene, a rude skivvy at No. 22. Afterwards in a Convent but was removed”, Hayward marginalium, copy 1.
[Textual History II 243]
Translation into English of
“Verses for the Coot”
Album Leaflet
Let us proceed to make a walk, if you give your consentment. We are going to aim our steps of the direction of Bina’s. Let us search the No. 22. Hast thou not seen, that this landscape with the tarnished herbaceous borders is queer? It is a land of trash. Nothing could be less picturesque. Even the Postman grinds his teeth and barbarises his face when he traverses this ambiguous quarter, which is one of the less attractive working-class districts. It is a land of bad and low jokes! in which, from the porticoes of Willett, rude skivvies keep an eye on you, hoping that you will pay court to them. There is very little life about! It is a waste and desolate piece of ground. One observes damaged cats, and even now and then a retired great coarse woman. But, behind a huge window where a vase of water-lilies shows off itself: listen! there are rare whispers and lunatic laughter. It is it. It is the disgusting creature. It is the vesperal spider with complex eyes and deadly poison, who, with an immodest look, makes to us a gesture which is cancelled by his strabismus. Let us proceed to make a walk, if you give your consentment. We are going to file off to these paltry gardens of Bina. Let us search the No. 22.
The rest is untranslate-able
Hayward’s attribution confirms that the translation is by TSE. Both poem and translation echo and parody many elements of TSE’s own poems.
water-lilies · · · whispers and lunatic laughter: “Whispers and small laughter between leaves · · · the waters”, Marina 20–21 (and see note). The rest is untranslateable: [We are going to take the trouble to relieve ourselves—and to ring the bell; let our arses fart as we wait for Magdalene.] For TSE, “Perhaps best omitted”, see Textual History 33–36.
Hayward to Anne Ridler, 20 Mar 1945, of his translation of Mon Faust (Horizon May 1945): “The Valéry was, I should add, commissioned by the old boy himself who wrote to me when the posts between France England were restored to say—don’t laugh!—‘Je n’oublierai jamais Bina gardens’! I ought to record this memorable fantasy in my copy of Noctes Binanianæ” (BL).
————
Not included in the present edition: Poema Latina and Album Leaflet No. 2, both by Geoffrey Faber.
[Textual History II 243–44]
Abschied zur Bina
Im schönen Binagarten
Wo die Lorbeeren blühen,
Sang der Kuckuck im Frühling
Mit Stimme knapp und kühn.
5
Im schönen Binagarten,
In der frechen Jugendzeit,
Einst trafen sich Gesellen
Für Heiterkeit bereit.
Zu Nummer zweiundzwanzig
10
Da kamen allerlei
Bedeutende Personen:
Ach, weh! das ist vorbei.
Verschiedene Arten Leute —
Sie kamen gern besuchen
15
Die alte schlaue Spinne
Zum Thee, mit Schnapps und Kuchen.
Feinschmecker manchmal kamen
Zum Essen und zum Trinken —
Bei Leberwurst und Butterbrot
20
Und Aquavit und Schinken.
Da trafen sich beisammen
Politiker und Richter
Und Diplomat und Advokat
Und Schauspieler und Dichter.
25
Der stolze Ritter Meiklejohn
War oftmals abgespannt;
Macdonald von den Inseln
Davon war nicht verbannt.
Es kam der alte Kauffer
30
Der Spiegeleier ass,
Der jung’ Holländer Betjeman
Der liebte Witz und Spass.
Und traurig wie ein Witwen-Vogel
Blass mit Leid und Schmerz,
35
Kam manchmal Richard Jannings
Der macht’ uns immer Scherz.
Mit leichter Unterhaltung
Und komischem Gedicht,
Und mit Gelache und Gesang
40
Bis helles Morgenlicht,
Man hatte nie Langweile,
War immer froh darein,
Mit Schnupftabak und Zigarett,
Kaffee und Burgundwein.
45
War alles ganz behaglich,
Grossartig und bequem;
Mit kolossaler Freundlichkeit
War’s all
zu angenehm.
* * * *
Die höheren Herrschaften,
50
Sie machten gern Besuch:
Damen mit seidenen Strümpfen
Und köstlichem Geruch;
Die elegantsten Damen,
Sie kamen alle gern:
55
Die Schlanksten und die Schönsten
Vom innern Mayfairkern.
Da kamen Herzoginnen,
Korrekt und wohlgesinnt;
Da kamen manchmal andere
60
Die anonymer sind.
Und kam die fromme Jenny
Die gut verwaltet sich;
Und kamen auch Dorinda
Und Janni Kennerlich.
65
Die nette Kodringburger,
Die schöne Kamerun —
Und wegen Regenwetter,
Sie trugen Gummischuhen.
* * * *
Zu Nummer zweiundzwanzig
70
Im schönen Binagarten,
Zuströmt nicht mehr Adel,
Gibt’s nichts mehr zu erwarten;
Im schönen Binagarten,
Der Kuckuck singt nicht mehr;
75
Da sieht man nur Kobolde
Die kriechen ab und her.
Im schönen Binagarten
Der Sommer ist vorbei.
Ich irre langsam und allein,
80
Mir bricht das Herz entzwei.
Hayward to Anne Ridler, 16 Aug 1944: “I must, alas, discountenance, once again, the pleasing legend · · · that I hold court, or whatever the word is, to the Great Good and Beautiful Intelligent of the five continents. I can’t conceive how this popular fallacy arose, unless it is that my sedentary life consequently relatively rare appearances in public places lead people to suppose that I’m incessantly closeted with visitors! The legend is played up, you may recall, in the Master’s German verses in Noctes Binanianæ” (BL).