Oiling up
Auberon Waugh
Britannia Bright's Bewilderment in the Wilderness of Westminster Clive James' illustrated by Marc (Cape £1.95) On the seventy-fourth page of Clive James's latest comic poem, the heroine meets Mr William Rees-Mogg: She met the famous editor, Dens-Fogg Who showed what can be done by sheer hard slog. Dens-Fogg wrote canting letters to his suri The way he thought Lord Chesterton had done.
He served them up again as editorials That weighed down on your soul like war memorials (God help the humourless! Of all their crimes
Amongst the worst is editing The Times). I had already marked some six couplets out of the 738-odd which precede this passage as
beitig quite good and possibly worth quoting in my review; now I found myself wondering idly whether this last one might not qualify too. It seemed rather neat. So I looked at the Passage again : She met the famous editor, Dens-Fogg Who showed what can be done by sheer hard slog. No, that's not very funny or perceptive. The beSt jokes about Rees-Mogg's famous letter to his son were all made in Private Eye about eight years ago, and have since been anthologised. I rather enjoy Mogg's editorials, but that is plainly a matter of personal taste. Let US concentrate on the couplet which, at first reading, I thought rather neat : (God help the humourless! Of all their crimes Amongst the worst is editing The Times)
Suddenly it occurred to me that this couplet has a major failing. Rees-Mogg has many faults, God knowS, and at times they have led him to do terrible things, but he simply does not lack a sense of humour. Of all the editors I have worked for--and I seem to have worked for most of them—I found his particular sense of the ridiculous among the keenest, not to say most reckless of the lot. My strongest impression was of someone who enjoyed the joke of being Editor of The 7:inies every bit as much as I would have ubne. Yet James, in his glib, know-all, "Martie-boots way, simply asserts that numourlessness is his chief characteristic:
God help the humourless! Of all their crimes Amongst the worst is penning silly rhymes About those members of a Higher Set Whom others know, but they have scarcely met. The chief detect of humourless Clive James Was dropping scores and scores of mighty names.
It was a squalid and pathetic hoax To make us think they take the place of jokes.
Rather to my surprise, I found I had written twenty couplets of this nursery doggerel in as many minutes. They were not particularly good and certainly not good enough to print but neither, as I say, are those of Mr Clive James. Perhaps forty couplets in the thousand or so printed here reach the standard of second prize on the Spectator's competition page, but that is the best one can say. The amazing thing is that he should have persuaded so many people to the contrary. I can only attribute this to his personal charm, or possibly to the skill with which he combines this clumsy and engagingly inept abuse with the occasional heartwarming tribute.
I was delighted, for instance, to see how a few sycophantic lines about the Observer Review in his last comic poem. Peregrine Prykke, earned him full front page serialisation for Britannia Bright in that organ. This time there is an encomium to Mr Harold Evans and the SundayTimesof such an abject nature as must Cause even those cheeks to blush, weathered as they are by the endless, cringing sycophancy of Thomson House employees jockeying for position. Somehow, too, he persuaded Jonathan Cape to produce the book in pretty, old-fashioned type face, and Mark Boxer to contribute his elegant, instantly recognisable illustrations to every ham-fisted pen portrait : At length we learn from this engaging pup What can be done by simply oiling up.
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