by T. S. Eliot
34] De chier sur le seuil. Sonnez! Hayward’s sheaf [To crap on the doorstep. Ring the bell!]
Translation into English of “Verses for the Coot”
ts1 (Faber archive): ribbon copy of the variant text (which misspells “syphilitic” with-ll-) given below; a carbon of this sent to Hayward (King’s) has TSE’s pencilled emendation from “squint” to “strabismus”.
Let us proceed to make a walk, if you give your consentment. We are going to aim our steps in the direction of Bina’s garden. Let us search No. 22. You notice beyond doubt, that this landscape with the tarnished herbaceous borders is queer enough. It is a land of trash. Nothing could be less Picturesque. Even the Post-man grinds his teeth and barbarises his face when he traverses this squinting quarter, which is one of the less attractive sub-urbs. It is a quarter of bad and low jokes! in which, from Willett porticoes, 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 syphilitic cats, and even now and then a superannuated prostitute. But, in the frame of a huge window and behind some water-lilies: 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 squint strabismus. Let us proceed to take a walk, if you give your consentment. We are going to walk straight at these picayune gardens of Bina. Let us search No. 22.
Abschied zur Bina
Hayward’s sheaf (King’s): dated on receipt by Hayward “31 Jan 1939”. A carbon sent to Geoffrey Faber (Faber archive) has the same inked emendations by TSE, but not those in pencil to 71 and 75.
PS and PPS: typed Faber postcards from TSE each with four lines (29–33 and 33–36). Respectively headed “P.S.” and “P.P.S.”, both cards are postmarked 3 Feb 1939 (King’s). An undated letter to Hayward follows in the bound volume “Essays, Addresses and Verses”:
I thought of putting in a stanza something like this:
Der Walfisch spielte frevelhaft
(Ein Prosenschwergewichter)
Poetisch quakt’ de Wasserhuhn —
Der Elefant sprach schlichter.
But on the whole perhaps it breaks the frame to introduce the fauna for the sake of the canon. I have no copy of the text. You will give me your opinion.
[The whale played wickedly | (A prose heavywieght) | The coot croaked poetically— | The elephant spoke more plainly.]
ts2 (Houghton): sent to Henry Eliot, 7 Feb 1939: “I may also have to send you a copy of some poems privately printed, ‘As were lately exchang’d between several of the choicest wits’ to which I contributed—the printing was an afterthought. I enclose for your amusement a copy of one of mine, written in relation to one of the wits, John Hayward, having lately moved from Bina Gardens Kensington to Chelsea.”
The text follows that of Noctes as emended by Hayward in copy no. 1, although some of his emendations, judged inessential, have been undone, and some other corrections of spelling, agreement and orthography have been introduced.
Title] FESTSCHRIFTGESCHENCK | Zum Geburtstag Jonny Heywald | 2 Februar, 1939 Hayward’s sheaf ‖ Abschied von Binagarten ts2 (“von” underlined with “Changed to zur.” in Henry Eliot’s hand)
3 der] Der Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading
5 schönen] Schönen Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading Binagarten,] Binagarten Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading, ts2
6 In der frechen] Im frecher Hayward’s sheaf ‖ In der frecher ts2
7 trafen sich] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ troffen die Hayward’s sheaf ‖ troffen sich ts2, Noctes Gesellen] die Gesellen Hayward’s sheaf
9 Zu] this ed. ‖ Zum tss, Noctes ‖ Nach Hayward in copy no. 1 zweiundzwanzig] zweiund zwanzig Hayward’s sheaf
13 Arten Leute—] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Arte Leute, tss ‖ Arte Leuten— Noctes
17–20] not Hayward’s sheaf
17, as also 59 manchmal] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ manchmals tss, Noctes
19 Bei] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Beim ts2, Noctes
21 trafen sich] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ troffen sich tss, Noctes
22 Richter] Richter, Hayward’s sheaf
23 Advokat] Advocat Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading
24 Schauspieler] Schauspierler Texas proof 1st reading
27 den] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ der tss, Noctes
28 nicht] nivht Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading
29–32] supplied by PPS ‖ not Hayward’s sheaf
30 ass,] ass; ts2
31 Betjeman] Betjemann PS ‖ Betjeman, ts2
33–36] supplied by PPS ‖ not Hayward’s sheaf
33 Witwen-Vogel] this ed. ‖ Witwe-Vogel, PPS, ts2 ‖ Witwen Vogel Hayward in copy no. 1
35 manchmal] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ jemals ts2, Noctes
39 Gelache] Gelächter Hayward in copy no. 1
40] Bis zum hellen Morgenlicht, Hayward in copy no. 1 helles] this ed. ‖ helle tss, Noctes
41 Langweile,] Langweile Hayward’s sheaf
43 Zigarett] this ed. ‖ Zigarrett tss, Noctes
45–48] not Hayward’s sheaf
49 höheren] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ höhere tss, Noctes
51 seidenen] tss ‖ siedene Texas proof 1st reading, BL and Bodleian proofs ‖ seidene TSE in BL proof, Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ siedenen Texas proof, Noctes Strümpfen] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Strumpfen tss, Noctes
52 Geruch;] Geruch. Hayward’s sheaf
53 elegantsten] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ elegantste tss, Noctes
54 gern:] gern, Hayward’s sheaf
55 Schlanksten] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Schlankste tss, Noctes Schönsten] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Schönste tss, Noctes
58 Korrekt] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Korret Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading ‖ Korrect Hayward’s sheaf 2nd reading, ts2, Noctes
60 anonymer] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ anonyme tss, Noctes
61 Jenny] Jenny, Hayward’s sheaf
62 verwaltet] aufführte Hayward’s sheaf
66 Kamerun—] Kamerun: Hayward’s sheaf
67 Regenwetter,] Regenwetter tss
68 Sie trugen] Trugen sie Hayward in copy no. 1
69 Zu] this ed. ‖ Zum tss, Noctes ‖ Nach Hayward in copy no. 1
71 Zuströmt nicht mehr Adel] this ed. ‖ Kommen die Adel jetzt nicht mehr— Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading ‖ Kommen die Adel nimmer mehr— Hayward’s sheaf 2nd reading ‖ Zuströmen kein mehr Adel, ts2
74 mehr;] mehr: Hayward’s sheaf
75] indent ts2 (error) Da sieht man nur] schwarzgekleidete Hayward’s sheaf 2nd reading Kobolde] Hayward in copy no. 1 ‖ Prelaten Hayward’s sheaf 1st reading ‖ Kobolden, Hayward’s sheaf 2nd reading ‖ Kobolden ts2, Noctes
76 kriechen] gehen Hayward’s sheaf her] her; Hayward’s sheaf
78 vorbei.] vorbei; Hayward’s sheaf
79 allein,] allein— Hayward’s sheaf ‖ allein ts2
80 Mir] Und tss 1st reading das] mein Hayward’s sheaf
Improper Rhymes
“In attempting to be amusing he sometimes has recourse, as other men than harried playwrights have been known to do, to the lowest bawdiness, which leaves us less with a sense of repugnance for the man who could write it than with a sense of pity for the man who could think of nothing better.” Thomas Heywood (1931)
“The only disinfectant which makes either blasphemy or obscenity sufferable is the sense of humour: the indecent that is funny may be the legitimate source of innocent merriment, while the absence of humour reveals it as purely disgusting.” After Strange Gods
In 1904, the Smith Academy Record published TSE’s A Fable for Feasters, a burlesque, in the Regency manner, on monastery life (“And flogged his mates ’till they grew good and friarly”). Also in 1904, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, TSE’s mother Charlotte Eliot engaged an old mariner to teach her two sons to sail. The following summer, when TSE was sixteen, his school magazine printed two of his stories. A
Tale of a Whale (1905) tells how the “Parallel Opipedon” (= “O pipe down”) became becalmed off Tanzatatapoo Island, where “the captain was pacing the quarter-deck, fanning himself. The watch were amusing themselves holystoning the deck, while the rest of the crew were eating ice-cream in the fore chains”. Harpooning a whale, and shipwreck, follow. The Man Who Was King (1905) tells of a sea-dog shipwrecked on the island of Matahiva, where he finds “a little mob of men beating bhghons (a sort of cross between tin pan and gong) and chanting monotonously”. Instead of being eaten by the natives, he is made king, and enjoys a life of “fishing, bathing, feasting, and getting drunk on wine made of the madu-nut”, before setting out again, for Tahiti. “Not long after the captain was there, the French got hold of it and built a post there. They educated the natives to wear clothes on Sunday and go to church, so that now they are quite civilized and uninteresting.”
The year after TSE’s death, Bonamy Dobrée set the Bolo and Columbo verses within “an elaborated joke, nurtured through years · · · about some primitive people called the Bolovians, who wore bowler hats, and had square wheels to their chariots. This invention he apparently began to toy with when he was at Harvard, there figuring King Bolo and his Queen. He did not tell me much about those characters—though he sent me a drawing of them—but I was given portions of a Bolovian Epic (not always very decorous) and something about their religion. This latter was in part an amiable satire on the way people, anthropologists especially, talk about the religion of others” (Dobrée).
Among suggestions as to the name Bolo, two of the most plausible are those of Southam and Crawford. Southam (in his notes to A Cooking Egg 28): “King Shamba Bolongongo (known today as Shyaam aMbul aNgoong) (died c. 1628), ruler of the Kuba tribes, legendary for the number of widows and children he left”. Southam adds that Eliot could have come across his name in Notes ethnographiques (1911) by Emil Torday, who had presented a wooden figure of Bolo to the British Museum. (TSE might also have seen a fetish figure in Bolobo, Upper Congo, illustrated and described in Folk-Lore Sept 1909. See note to title of The Waste Land I: The Burial of the Dead.) Alternatively, Crawford 83: “His name, as Eliot knew from fine art classes, meant ‘ground for gilding’”, citing TSE’s notes on Edward Waldo Forbes’s Harvard course Fine Arts 20b (see note to Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 10, “gesso ground”). TSE to Conrad Aiken, 19 July 1914, had featured a table, BLESS AND BLAST, imitating the lists in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast 1 (June). BLESS began with Columbo and Bolo and included the Chaplain. blast included the Bosun, the Cook and Prof. Dr. Krapp.
Lewis to Pound [Jan 1915]: “Eliot has sent me Bullshit the Ballad for Big Louise [The Triumph of Bullshit and Ballade pour la grosse Lulu]. They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry. I am longing to print them in Blast; but stick to my naif determination to have no ‘Words ending in -Uck, -Unt, and -Ugger’”, Pound/Lewis ed. Timothy Materer (1985). (These particular words do not appear in either of the poems, for which see “Uncollected Poems”.) TSE to Pound, 2 Feb [1915]:
I have corresponded with Lewis, but his puritanical principles seem to bar my way to Publicity. I fear that King Bolo and his Big Black Kween will never burst into print. I understand that Priapism, Narcissism etc. are not approved of, and even so innocent a rhyme as
… pulled her stockings off
With a frightful cry of “Hauptbahnhof!!”
is considered decadent.
(“central station”, German.) Pound to Harriet Monroe, 28 June 1915: “If you think he lacks vigour merely because he happens to have portrayed Mr Prufrock the unvigorous, vous vous trompez. His poem of Christopher Columbus is vigorous, and male, not to say coarse. I think however he may produce something both modest and virile before the end of the chapter.”
The printing and censorship of books later became a professional concern for TSE. To Leonard Woolf, 18 Mar 1932: “We had to have a directors’ meeting of over three quarters of an hour a couple of days ago to deal with fuck and bugger in a book of verse.”
TSE to James Joyce, 21 May 1921:
I am delighted to hear that even a limited and very expensive edition [of Ulysses] is to appear. Has it been properly circularised in England? If not, I might supply a few names. I wish that Miss Beach would bring out a limited edition of my epic ballad on the life of Christopher Columbus and his friend King Bolo, but
Bolo’s big black bastard queen
Was so obscene
She shocked the folk of Golder’s Green.
Pound to TSE [28? Jan 1922]: “You can forward the Bolo to Joyce if you think it wont unhinge his somewhat sabbatarian mind. On the hole he might be saved the shock, shaved the sock.”
Pound to TSE, 29 Aug 1922: “your admirer [John Peale] Bishop thinks of collecting Bawdy Ballads, of War and Peace. (the real folk litterchure), including ‘She Was Pore but she wuz honest’ and others that ought n’t be left longer to the incertitude of verbal tradition.”
TSE’S proposals for an “OPEN WIRELESS VAUDEVILLE”, sent to Dobrée on 30 Dec 1929 (Letters 4), included: “T. S. Eliot | The Bellowing Baritone | With Bolovian Ballads | ‘The Blue Baboon’.”
To Clive Bell, 3 Jan 1941: “I may even take in hand the long neglected task of putting in order the epical ballad on the life of Chris Columbo (the famous Portuguese navigator) and his friends King Bolo and his Big Black Queen.”
To Dobrée, 6 Aug 1941, signing off: “So meanwhile, as the Bolovians used to say (for their happy island has now disappeared): ‘wux-ho!’”
On the verso of an undated wedding announcement card sent to Aiken in 1957: “I am, I may tell you, intensely happy, except for the fact that Valerie wants to learn about King Bolo. That’s your fault. So far, I have withstood all her appeals to me to burst into Bolovian song.” Valerie Eliot, TLS 17 Feb 1984: “It is not true, as William Baker asserts (Letters, February 10), that T. S. Eliot was still writing his ‘King Bolo’ limericks ‘in the late 1950s’. Almost all were written during his Harvard days and none later than 1916.” When TSE was asked by Donald Hall, “Do you write anything now in the vein of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats or King Bolo?” he replied: “Those things do come from time to time · · · Oh, yes, one wants to keep one’s hand in you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. One doesn’t want to lose one’s skill”, Paris Review (1959).
Valerie Eliot to Aiken, 23 Nov 1964, acknowledging a copy of A Seizure of Limericks (1964): “Tom was so pleased to receive your limericks and we laugh over them together.” In an obituary for Life, 15 Jan 1965, Aiken wrote: “I’m the official custodian of his King Bolo poems, which are all quatrains or octets about an imaginary monarch and his queen, but he neglected to send the bulk of them to me.”
Given first here are the verses that figure within letters (to Aiken, Pound and Dobrée, respectively) and some context to make clear what kind of writing this is. Second, The Columbiad partly published in March Hare (being from the Notebook) and now supplemented with other “stanxos” and “stanzos” from Valerie’s Own Book and elsewhere. Third, miscellaneous ribald rhymes. Some verses that were recycled have here been printed only once. A sense of the changes involved is given by comparing the verses sent to Bonamy Dobrée as The Catalogue of Ships (15 Aug 1927) and Deipnosophistic (29 Sept 1927) with The Columbiad st. 19 and st. 43.
In Letters to Conrad Aiken
To Aiken, 19 July 1914:
I’ve written some stuff—about fifty lines, but I find it shamefully laboured, and am belabouring it more. If I can improve it at all I will send it you. [On 25 July he sent O little voices of the throats of men and The Love Song of St Sebastian.] If you write me Poste Restante I shall get it; and if you are in the country (or just off for the country) you must of course leave my luggage out of consideration. It is not essential to me. If you are not in the country or going to the country you might wait a few days, and I will send you an address. Meanwhile I will send you this to go to sleep on:
Now while Columb
o and his men
Were drinking ice cream soda
In burst King Bolo’s big black queen
That famous old breech l[oader].
Just then they rang the bell for lunch 5
And served up—Fried Hyenas;
And Columbo said “Will you take tail?
Or just a bit of p[enis]?”
The bracketed portions we owe to the restorations of the editor, Prof. Dr. Hasenpfeffer (Halle), with the assistance of his two inseparable friends, Dr. Hans Frigger (the celebrated poet) and Herr Schnitzel (aus Wien). How much we owe to the hardwon intuition of this truly great scholar! The editor also justly observes: “There seems to be a double entendre about the last two lines, but the fine flavour of the jest has not survived the centuries”.—Yet we hope that such genius as his may penetrate even this enigma. Was it really the custom to drink ice-cream soda just before lunch? Prof. Dr. Hasenpfeffer insists that it was. Prof. Dr. Krapp (Jena) believes that the phrase is euphemistic, and that they were really drinking—SEIDLIDZ POWDER. See Krapp: STREITSCHRIFT GEGEN HASENPFEFFER I.xvii §367, also Hasenpfeffer: POLEMISCHES GEGEN KRAPP I–II. 368ff. 490ff.
————
To Aiken, 30 Sept [1914]:
My war poem, for the $100 prize, entitled
UP BOYS AND AT ’EM!
Adapted to the tune of C. Columbo lived in Spain and within the compass of the average male or female voice:
Now while our heroes were at sea
They pass’d a German warship.
The captain pac’d the quarterdeck
Parading in his corset.
What ho! they cry’d, we’ll sink your ship! 5
And so they up and sink’d her.
But the cabin boy was sav’d alive
And bugger’d, in the sphincter.