Mirrors up to Art
CYRIL CONNOLLY pointed out recently that writ- ing parodies was a sure sign of ambition in a young writer. As Dwight Macdonald writes in the introduction to his scholarly and compen- dious anthology, parody is a form of direct literary criticism, involving the whole writer. (It is surprising, perhaps, that it has not occurred to Dr. Leavis to recommend the writing of parody as part of his reformed English syllabus—he is well equipped with his minutely analytical ob- servation of language, his irony and his decided moral standpoint.) But it is not surprising that there have been no full-time professional parodists of considerable stature in England since the Smith brothers of the early nineteenth century. The most satisfying parody 'presupposes an intensity and acuteness of reading from which sympathy cannot be wholly absent, and to sustain the perverse creativity necessary, the parodist must identify himself with his subject, which tends to make his work occasional.
Mr. Macdonald's anthology, though impres- sive in the breadth of reading that has gone into its compilation, though pleasantly produced and witt4 edited (there are footnotes and appendices and other paraphernalia of an academic work), is not quite the indispensable book it should be One of the rules which the editor tried to ob- serve was that only parodies of currently read Writers should be included. On the whole he has kept to this carefully, but still the book has considerable gaps in twentieth-century English literature, among both parodists and parodees. Nothing by Allan M. Laing, L. E. Jones or Jean Kerr—surely her travesty of Sagan is as good as anything since the war?—nothing of Auden, Tennessee Williams, Salinger, Angus Wilson, Dylan Thomas or Ivy Compton-Burnett.
The question of who gets parodied and who doesn't is almost inexplicable. It is certainly not to do with fame, not much to do with an easily copied style nor really to do with pretentious- ness. On the evidence of this and other books of parodies, I would guess that the most parodied authors are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Browning, Swinburne, Whitman, Henry James and Gertrude Stein or Hemingway. Competi- tion: imagine you are one of these writers entering a competition in which you have to explain why you and the others named are the most parodied, in the style of one of the others (e.g., Wordsworth by Gertrude Stein). . . .
But for what Mr. Macdonald has unearthed, familiar and quite unknown, we must be very grateful. Beerbohm, of course, towers. Not only is his ear faultless, but his imagination, his sense of a situation which would be irresistible to the writer, is unerring. Here he is as Edmund Gosse, introducing Browning to Ibsen in Venice:
He asked me whether Herr Browning had ever married. . . . Loth though I was to cast a blight on his interest in the matter, I conveyed to him with all possible directness the im- pression that Elizabeth Barrett had assuredly been one of those wives who do not dance tarantellas nor slam front doors.
He has been rightly generous with the strict good sense of Cold Comfort Farm, which, in- cidentally, is a double parody against Earth Mothers and for Jane Austen. He has discovered a perfect piece of post-Freudiana in an article giving the phallic interpretation of Struwwel- peter, reprinted in glorious toto from New Writing: Struwwelpeter recognises and gives expression to the criminality and sexuality of the child; in the case of the little girl, the wish to set fire to her genitals; in the case of the little boy masturbation inspired by cruelty to animals and to the mother, together with the self- realisation that castration is the only cure for him.
The greatest parodies permanently alter our appreciation of a writer, abash us with what we had not noticed. In this category come Mr. Connolly's version of Aldous Huxley, 'Told in Gath,' and Hugh Kingsmill's terse, definitive destruction of The Shropshire Lad:
What, still alive at twenty-two, A clean upstanding chap like you?
JULIAN JEBB
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