Nonsense and sensibility

Anthony Burgess

The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse Ed. Geoffrey Grigson (Faber £5.95) The Children's Book of Comic Verse chosen by Christopher Logue; illustrated by Bill Tidy (Batsford £3.95) Mr Grigson, being a distinguished poet and not, despite Sir Philip Sidney's identification of the two vocations, a philospher; not being a specialist in linguistics, though his metier is the exploitation of language, wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just' as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense. There must, in fact, be more looseness, in essence as in form, in a book of nonsense verse than in one of sense verse, and Mr Grigson gives us odd bits of prose as well as poems.

He was right to collect Foote's prose test for actors (the panjandrum with the little button on top and so on), and it must have been a great temptation to include the entire recit of Blake's An Island in the Moon, not just the little mad songs. As Mr Grigson knows French, he gives us French nonsense. As he does not, any more than Thackeray did, know Breton, he cites Thackeray citing a Breton poem and raises an interesting difficulty. I have checked the poem with Breton speakers and my own Breton dictionary, and it seems to be a genuine and sensible piece of popular literature. If it is nonsense, it is nonsense as any foreign language is to a person who does not know that language. If a key is available to unlock sense, then there is no nonsense. This is probably nonsense to Mr Grigson: Kalau tuan mudek ka-hulu. Charikan saya bunga kemoja . . .

To me it is profound and moving Indonesian sense. And what do we say about this?

Un petit d'un petit S'etonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit Ah! degres te fallent . . .

It comes from the admirable Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames by the former Hollywood actor Luis d'Antin Van Rooten. To a French reader it will make a kind of surrealist sense, and Van Rooten falls over himself to elucidate difficulties with most lavish notes; to an English reader who grasps the sonic clue (a Frenchman in the net room reciting an English nursery rhyme) there is no nonsense, just as there ought to be none in this, which is a kind of complement or compliment to Van Rooten: Oak-laired earl, a leaner, Moan: `Ah me!' beer-raw.

(The earl, hiding from his pursuers in a tree, is raw within from a surfeit of beer ; he leans, unable to stand, and is told to give audible vent to his sufferings.) You will find a lot of Carroll here, and too much Lear. This, I know, is a matter of taste, and, as Lear more or less patented nonsense, you cannot well keep him out of a nonsense anthology. But who ever found 'The Akond of Swat' funny or the limericks other than wearisome? This, by Conrad Aiken, is what a limerick ought to be: It's time to make love: douse the glim, the fireflies twinkle and dim, the stars lean together like birds of a feather and the loin lies down with the limb.

The Carroll is all good, but anybody likely to buy this book will certainly already have The Hunting of the Snark elsewhere, and it takes up all of 20 pages. We could have had, in those 20, some of Edith Sitwell's Facade and The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' • from Finnegan's Wake. Both are high nonsense and great comedy but are neglected equally by Grigson and (in the Oxford Book of Comic Verse) Amis. As comic verse presumably contains nonsense, we get here what we get there, including Gilbert's 'Nightmare Song' and that fine anonymous poem of circa 1655 which begins, 'Oh that my lungs could bleat like butter'd pease'.

But there is nothing to complain about. If it is necessary to have a nonsense anthology, then this is the one it is neces sary to have. But, to be honest, not every reader will finish a read-through smiling. I wish to God Eliot had never written about those damned cats. I wish the nonsense writers in general had not been so cruelly sentimental about animals. I wish that Mr Grigson had, to show the limits of nonsense, versified some of his own book reviews.

Christopher Logue's compilation would seem, coming so soon after the Amis, to be published at an inopportune time, but, despite inevitable overlaps with both Amis and Grigson ( 'The Akond of Swat' is dutifully here), this has its own flavour, its unique choices, and a teknotropism not solely to be found in the title and Bill Tidy's excellent drawings (like that of a cow giving Cowca-Cola). There is a vulgarity that will appeal to children, as in the limerick about Carter the champion farter and the quatrain about seeing the glorious behind of the moon, the point pushed home by Tidy's buttocks gleaming in the sky. There is a poem by J.A. Lindon about knickers, ending: Jill's have frills, and Pat's are plain, With a button in case they fall ; And (may I whisper once again?)

I HAVEN'T A PAIR AT ALL!

The only trouble with such an anthology, one specifically addressed to children, I mean, must always be that the kids, if shoved to it, can always do better than the grown-ups when it comes to making verses designed to please them. As the Opies showed, the children of England were already singing Hark the herald angels sing Mrs Simpson's pinched our king almost before the story of the heptedwardian crisis broke. A later Christmas had them warbling We four Beatles of Liverpool are, John in a taxi, Paul in a car.

George on a scooter Bibbing his hooter, Following Ringo Starr.

They like the combination of parody and intense .topicality, and there's no room for the latter in an anthology. They like dirt and ruthlessness and a kind of ingenuity too brutal for wit: Our soldiers went to war Our soldiers fought Our soldiers stuck their bayonets Up the Germans' (da capo, for ever). lf, on the other hand, Mr Logue wants the children to learn to love literature, the attempt must be made through the representation of adult emotion — real sex and real treachery and real murder. Whatever children read this hook freely, or are read to out of it in school, they will feel superior to what it contains; they will despise the (so it will seem to them) condescending purveyors of the stuff of groans or tired giggles.

But let me not be too harsh. I've tried some of these verses out on my son, and he liked a few of them. This, for instance: On Nevski Bridge a Russian stood Chewing his beard for lack of food. Said he, 'It's tough this stuff to eat But a darn sight better than shredded wheat!

Out of his own knowledge of shredded wheat flicked a desire to know what Nevski Bridge was. And Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes gave him a film-cartoon thrill of cruelty. Then he went out on his motor-bike into the real world.