Review: A Little Pilgrim’s Peeps at Parnassus by Olga Katzin

 A Little Pilgrim’s Peeps at Parnassus first drew my attention because of its awkward title, then because of the brilliant illustrations by Arthur Watts. A few peeps of my own showed that it seemed to be a children’s book, teaching the history of British literature through the ages in rhyming couplets. I thought I’d get it and give it a go.

As I read the piece, I started to question my assumptions. It’s rhyming hexameters, especially those with the forced rhymes - seemed comic, inflated, maybe even hudibrastic. What’s more the piece was incredibly opinionated, though the didactic nature of some older children’s books tends that way, it seemed to be pushed to comic extremes. The book also expected the reader to be pretty knowledgeable about English history and literature, with its references to Praisegod Barebones and minor Elizabethan writers. Again though, many earlier children’s books did expect quite a lot of (what is now) specialist knowledge from its readers. I had to look it up.

Had my copy of this book retained its dust-jacket, I’d have discovered the author of the book, Olga Katzin and the full title; Peeps at Parnasus: A Delicious Survey, Half Parody, Half Caricature, of the Whole Pageant of English Verse-Malicious and Gay. Rather than a strange, opinionated children’s book, it’s a strange opinionated adult book masquerading as a children’s one.

Starting with the druids, singing their native British songs of praise before being cruelly slaughtered by Romans, the book posits a ‘British Muse’ that is sometimes made at home on her island of birth and sometimes chased away by other things (often, those pesky foreign influences - though the story of the beginning of the book is essentially about how English emerged from all those pesky foreign influences). 

After the druids were the Anglo-Saxons with their “mile on alliterative mile”, followed by Danes, and the Normans. At this point England was open to ‘anyone who ruled the waves’ so William thought he’d give it a go, even despite the firm English reply of “Really William” and “Enough”. As a result, the muse chose not to spend time with the Norman language  and instead;

   “dived into the melting pot

  where English speech was being made-

…

She spent her subterranean time

In making reason mate with rhyme.”

Until Chaucer came along. Then a bunch of people who tried to sound like Chaucer, and then new, exciting people like Spenser, Lyly and Herrick. Interestingly, Shakespeare is not named in this book. He’s alluded to and the Mermaid Tavern is mentioned but the story as told in this book is of a shining, over-the-top time that is then clamped down by puritans like the aforementioned Barebones and by Milton. Before being punctured by the noble knight Hudibras. 

Then we get into the eighteenth century and “The little, mighty Alexander” who is a “galaxy of wits in one” who ruled “arbitrarily” with such smile and bite that even the muse grows scared of him. 

“None wing with such accomplished Craft

The polished Couplet’s lethal Shaft

In flights of dazzling Coruscation

As if expressly for Quotation.”

Pope is followed by the Scriblerans, other poets and then, horror of horrors - Grub Street! Those filthy unlettered beggars who write for money, trash the Muse and sell her on street corners. 

“The greedy and abandoned trollop

Don’t even put her parasol-up.” (Which is a pretty good example of some of the rhymes in this piece… luckily, she has a hero.

“Her providential rescuer

The doating Lexicographer

A rock of adamantine stuff

A mountain in a cloud of snuff,

Withdraws her from her venal ease

To Virtue and the Cheshire Cheese.” (Which is 3 minutes walk from where I’m writing this in Gough Square).

After Johnson has saved the Muse (and marked Goldsmith’s homework) we run onto Thompson, Ossian, Chatterton, a visit to some graveyard poets and onto Burns.

So the book goes on for another hundred pages, getting more detailed and more obscure until it reaches the writer’s time of 1927. It charts poetry’s superstar years with the romantics, its decline under the tyranny of Dickens and the age of the novel. The part about The Great War and the war poets is surprisingly touching, yet also makes the point that if there hadn’t have been a war, they’d have been writing airy nonsense about flowers. 

Amongst the highlights of the later parts of the book are a friendly welcome to “chubby Mr Lear”, a poet who could be easily missed in a survey such as this. Yeats gets describes as “more surely sidhe-like than the sidhe” and T.S Elliot is described as, “serving putrid forage/ from intellectual cold storage”. 

I’d have probably appreciated the book more had I been more of a poetry person, a barb stings rather less if you don’t know who it is aimed at but I enjoyed this book for its bad attitude and daft rhymes. 

Willesden Green Tales

 For almost the last ten years I’ve lived in a little garret opposite Willesden Green Station. Out of my window, I’ve seen the green minaret of the Brent Central Mosque, gently glowing in the sunlight (or not, if it’s not). The garden is part of a row of gardens and has been the home to a surprising variety of birds, from parakeets and pigeons to jays, waxwings and a woodpecker. Like a lot of places in London, it has an insular feel, like a little pocket within the greater whole - and there have also been some unusual people, events and sights. I thought I’d record them for posterity.

Where I lived

When I went to see my little bedsit, it was always around 5pm. This is always a golden time, as the windows face west and the golden sunshine hits the edges of the mirrors and cause rainbows to drift around the room. 

The place is in the attic of my landlord, a former film editor who worked on films as diverse as Branagh’s Hamlet and Zombies Vs Cockneys. His brother was an assistant to George Michael, lately turned undertaker and author of Dead Ahead. He and his wife have always been good to me and when I caught covid, I was the lucky recipient of some brilliant meals.

The day I moved in, some police turned up at the house to ask questions of someone who had been a witness. A next door neighbour also came round, he’d seen the police car and decided to tell them that he’d found something in his garden he suspected to be an unexploded WWII German bomb. However, the police were busy, so he told me. I’m not sure if he ever told the police. I don’t know if he did find an unexploded bomb and, if he did, I don’t know if it’s still there.

Guard Dog Man

My little garret faces the back garden. There are a row of back gardens from the street, but the houses in the street behind also have their back gardens touching ours - this means there’s a surprisingly diverse range of birds and insects that make their homes there.

It also means that it’s a safe place for urban foxes to romance and later raise their cubs. Many evenings I’ve watched cubs play in the garden and it’s always a sweet and magical experience. Many times I’ve also heard foxes making love, that isn’t. The fox’s cry is a terrible sound at the best of time, part death-scream, part otherworldly abomination but sex cries of a fox are something else.

Somewhere in the road behind us there lived a man I designated ‘Guard Dog Man’. Whenever the foxes made noises, so did he. Presumably, he hoped the noise of him would scare them off but they never did. The sound he made was gruff, like a barking dog and he made it every time the foxes did. This meant that when I heard the foxes, it was less their noise I was concerned about, but the fact they’d set off Guard Dog Man. They’d squeal and squall and he’d bark pointlessly and that was their cycle, for years and years.

The Denim Twitcher

The next character steers me onto more delicate territory. There’s a man who haunts Willesden Green tube station every weekday morning who clearly has some difficulty or another. I’ve only spoken to him once, he’d fallen over and I helped him stand up but I don’t know his name or story. He always wears a checked rag round his head and an outfit that consists of a range of faded denim clothes. He also always wears a Lynard Skynard t-shirt. I don’t know if he always wears the same outfit exactly, but it’s always the same kind of thing.

He moves in the most extraordinary way. He twitches and lurches. He stands still and robotically strikes his hand up and down. He jolts and jerks, his walk stiff and sudden and alarming - it certainly helps me imagine what it must have seemed like to people meeting Samuel Johnson for the first time. He sometimes speaks, usually bellowed swear words but mainly he howls. I’ve heard him making sex-noises at women as they pass though. 

Like clockwork, he emerges from his house, he makes his erratic way up the street, he goes into Gails or Costa and then he goes to Willesden Green tube to shout and wail before catching a bus somewhere. If he needs a wee, he doesn’t go back to the house he emerges from but instead pisses on the street corner, his jerking body sending splashes everywhere.

I have no desire to laugh at this man, I have no knowledge of whatever it is he labours under, but he is a noticeable and fascinating feature of the environment and seems worth recording.

Mr Pimp-Tortoise

In the early years of moving in, there was another man who stood out who I designated in my head, ‘Mr Pimp-Tortoise’. 

He was an elderly man who wore a 1970s pimp suit in yellows and browns and oranges. It had huge pointed lapels, flared trousers, a hat and can - the whole shebang. This man must have been something in the 70s (or at the least, must have looked like he was). Now, however, he’d wizened and shrunk, his little head and small neck poking out of the already huge collar like a little tortoise. I always wondered about his story, who he had been and who he was now. I never saw him after covid.

Neils’ Photo Agency

Willesden Green’s biggest mystery. A photographers, presumably owned by two people called Neil. Neither Neil has ever been spotted. No one has ever entered the shop and no one has ever left it. 

What’s more, the photos that are stuck all over the windows, unmounted and frequently wonky, are always faded. Even on the rare occasion that a new photo is put up, it’s already faded. They aren’t even the kind of photo that would be taken by a photographers - there are no school photos, no portraits against a blank backdrop - instead there are holiday camera shots, photos of people a long way away, photos of people in their houses or against a bush. Many of the photos clearly date back years, most of them are poorly focused or badly framed. Why would a photographers only show off bad photos? It must be a front… for something. 

West Sussex Charcoal

There’s an Irish butchers on Willesden High Street. It’s got a good reputation and always looks very clean and appealing (if meat is your thing). There are two windows in the shop. One allows potential customers to peer at the meat counter, the other is stacked up with charcoal briquettes. These aren’t the outside-a-petrol-station kind, these look like premium charcoal. The most premium must be the ones labelled ‘West Sussex Charcoal’.

I’ve often found the attribution of place-names on products pretty funny. Is there really better quality in a Norfolk turkey to a different turkey? Would a Suffolk turkey be okay? The charcoal really tickled me, because surely, once charcoal is made, it lasts a long time and can be transported a long way. I understand why a product may seem better with British cream, you don’t really want cream that’s travelled half of Europe… but charcoal?

Even better, it has to be West Sussex charcoal, none of that East Sussex rubbish. I’d walk to work imagining a man (and it would definitely be a man) who lives out in Essex but gets a train every now and then to Willesden, just because the shop sold the West Sussex charcoal he so craved. Other places might sell East Sussex charcoal, or even worse, charcoal with no known providence at all. 

The West Sussex charcoal must be pretty popular because there are big gaps in time when the shop have run out and just display other charcoals. I imagine the man coming all the way from Essex, getting to the window of the butcher’s shop and being bitterly disappointed. 

The Book-swipe

Just inside Willesden Green Station there are is a small bookcase. On this bookcase people bring and take books. It’s called a book-swap, but for me (and it seems many others) it’s principally a book-swipe. I’ve grabbed some wonderful books from this place, discovered new authors and generally had my reading life greatly improved. I might miss it most of all.

Under the Glass: He Who is Tired of London...

 

My least favourite Johnson quote is also perhaps his most quoted. I’m not sure if it’s my least favourite because it is the most quoted - a form of quote overplay. It is of course; “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

The quote was on the wall of the Museum of London, on the sign outside Dr Johnson’s House, on a range of fridge magnets and Oyster card holders - and on dozens and dozens of quaint pictures and ‘quotes’ images.

More completely, Johnson said; “you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Well, intellectual or not, I’m leaving London. I’m even willing. Not just willing, but looking forward to it.

I moved to London almost twenty years ago to pursue a Masters in writing. I’d actually got confused over which university had accepted me and found myself living quite the distance from the university. Not that it mattered much, I only went one day a week. The rest of the time I was working thirteen-hour shifts at The White Swan, a Wetherspoons just outside Highbury and Islington Tube station (and a few minutes walk from both Kit Smart and Goldsmith’s retreat in Cannonbury - but I didn’t know about them yet).

I kept a letter to the local newspaper about the place. 

“If anyone required encouragement to give up smoking and excessive drinking, I suggest they walk past the White Swan at Highbury Corner any day of the week. Never have I seen such an unpleasant looking and miserable group of people as those gathered outside - their features and demeanour showing the ravages of a lifetime of alcohol and tobacco abuse. It really does serve as an excellent deterrent.” Seems a bit harsh.

Whilst still doing my Masters, I got a job at The Big Bus Company as a Tour Guide. Learning the huge amount of information during a beautiful May fortnight was a wonderful thing. It was helped that the person training me was the very talented Miles Tredinnick. The experience of actually being an tour guide on an open top bus was less enjoyable. Whilst May had been glorious, the summer itself was a bit of a washout, the teams on the pavement kept filling the bus with customers who didn’t speak the same language as me and I got into an argument about some time off I’d booked four months in advance.

It was then I lived in Putney. I was the lodger of a ninety-four year old Hungarian Jewish lady who’d survived the Nazis and the Soviets and claimed to have invented those shirts with the stripy bodies but solid collar and cuffs. She was now an artist, a member of the Royal Academy. She was also a lifeline to me when I lost the bus job and was in a long period of unemployment before I got a job at Whittard’s Coffee and Tea, until it went under two months later. 

The next job I had was at ‘The London Bridge Experience and Tombs’. I was essentially a barker, trying to get people who were on their way to work to come into a shitty rip off of The London Dungeons. I was dressed in a ripped suit with white face and black eyes, blood made from corn syrup was smeared over me. Once I had to wash some windows with a seven foot tall man and a little person. The owners never remembered my name and called me Christopher Biggens. They essentially dropped me when I was off with Swine Flu, which I caught on my birthday.

I’ve only been mugged once. Not long after, some people tried to break into the house but I scared them away with lots of noise - these both happened when I lived in the posh area of Putney. In all the supposed rough (idiots would say ‘no-go’) areas I’ve lived, I’ve been safe. Only in Putney was I ever threatened.

There was the time in the house in Harlesden when a dead body showed up on the lawn. He’d got drunk and decided to get home by climbing over all the fences, bashed his head and died from the head injury in our garden while we were asleep. That was an eventful house. For a time, I lived with a rickshaw driver/drug dealer who’d be full of ecstasy and come onto me when I was getting ready for work. For a time, the house filled up with vets and sick animals. A Charlie Chaplin impersonator lived down the street and would walk to work swinging his cane.

Then there was the bad flat. I rented it off a man and it wasn’t his flat. The owner turned up one day demanding to know who I was. The boiler didn’t work for three months. Everything was filthy. There was a man running a pirate radio station and every plugged in speaker in the flat gently played the sounds of reggae, even if not actually turned on. I did have one lovely Saturday chatting with a guy and drinking pints of chilled vodka. 

This place has been much cosier, though oddness still seeps in. I’ve gained a relative financial security for the first time in my adult life and, thanks to Dr Johnson’s House and The Reviews Hub, I’ve been able to got to all sorts of cultural, theatrical and other events for free. 

There really is all life can afford in London, but frequently, the only life I can afford are the difficult, uncomfortable and scrabbly bits. The fact is, Johnson is right, London is wonderful and contains a bit of everything. It’s just, for those not blessed with a yearly pension from the monarch, the sides of life it most often shows are the sides that tire you out eventually. He seems to forget it’s the same city he wrote about in his younger days where you had to make a will before stepping out the door. I have loved my life in London, I reckon I’ve squeezed about as many drops out of it as a poor person can, and I’m looking forward to building a new life somewhere a little smaller, more comfortable and cheaper.

Review: Johnsonian Gleanings X: Johnson’s Early Life: The Final Narrative by Aleyn Lyell Reade

 Johnsonian Gleanings X: Johnson’s Early Life: The Final Narrative is a bit of a victory lap for Aleyn Lyell Reade. In this volume, he retells Johnson’s early life with all the details he’d discovered in the previous nine. 

in the preface he talks about how his journey started in 1903, when he started researching his own family tree and found all sorts of Johnson connections. In 1906 he self-published the account of his family with an addenda about Johnson’s family connections - an addenda that rather overwhelmed the original account and, as he said, “the tail wagged the dog.” From then on he dove into Johnson’s family history, finding connections, new stories and fixing old suppositions and mistakes. In 1915 his researches were interuppted, not just because of the shortage of paper but also because he served for three years “disguised as a private soldier”. The 1920s were a productive time for the Gleanings but stopped again for world war. This volume came out in 1946.

Reade intends Volume X to be a summary of all the work so far into a book more readable to the general public, who are less likely to have the stamina to trawl through the works prior. He hopes that it will be useful to future biographers - as it undoubtedly was.

He also presents the book free of footnotes, and largely trimmed of the raw material and evidence he used to arrive at the story he does. He hopes the book is not pedantic, though he is aware that he is prone to that “humourless fault.” He assures that every decision he has made in telling Johnson’s early life is carefully weighed up, analysed and based on the firm evidence presented in other volumes of the Gleanings. He describes that work as the scaffolding that this one is based on but that “the sweat and tears that went to the erection of that scaffolding have been wiped away.” 

He semi-apologises that chunks of the story have a genealogical basis, but that is the way he came into the subject and how he researched it. He also apologises for the title of ‘gleanings’, feeling that it doesn’t cover the “scope and serious intention of the work.” He then thanks many people, one of them being a Mr Laithwaite, I presume the same one who wrote The History of the Conduit Lands Trust.

As someone who has read three previous volumes of Gleanings and James L Cliffords rewrite of this work, The Young Sam Johnson, I wasn’t expecting to come across much I hadn’t already read. I mainly read this because I was interested to see how this project ended (the next volumes are an index) but also because I’ve been finding it useful to refresh myself with the early events of Johnson’s life, in preparation in writing a novel about it. I still found myself writing twelve pages of notes. 

I found out a little more about Michael Johnson, the streets he lived in as he grew up and the fact he moved so often suggested his early poverty. I was also informed of an interesting link between one of his publications, The Happy Sinner, and ‘The Queen of Hungary’s Water”, an over-the-counter medication that he sold in his shop. In the book, the ‘happy sinner’ of the title, a convicted murderer bequeathed the recipe of the water to the country. Incidentally, The Queen of Hungary’s Water is a distillation of rosemary and alcohol and still available at eye-watering prices.

Reade also clears up the issue of the apprenticeship of Michael’s brother, Andrew. First as a cobbler and later as a bookseller, being in the unenviable position of having served two apprenticeships. He gives a useful list of all of Michael’s civic positions, clears up a lot of the confusion about his parchment business and lists the books he published by himself. These books are determined by Reade to be “hardly on the gay side”, reaffirming his serious nature.

For someone planning a novel about the young Samuel Johnson (or more particularly, his brother) there were some very useful titbits. He and his brother slept in separate bedrooms that both contained fireplaces which were very likely rarely lit. The family occupied pew 34 in St Mary’s Church. Johnson was fond of a ham and cheese cob, loved a strawberry and snacked on dry oats. There’s a comprehensive chapter of all of Samuel’s probable classmates, the records of the school having been lost. Annoyingly, he doesn’t speculate whether his brother, Nathaniel was one of them.

Now unleashed to offer his opinions, Reade has many interesting ideas about the Johnson family. He supposes that Samuel and Michael were quite alike, that they bore a considerable resemblance to each other both physically and mentally. He wishes he could go back in time and reassure Michael that Samuel would not only do well but become a huge success. He’s harder on Sarah Johnson, declaring, “great men are usually supposed to owe their character to their mother, but we look in vain for signs of mental or moral distinction from Mrs Johnson.” He also describes her as a nagger. Yet, she was extremely popular, a “conspicuously amiable woman who won the complete affection of her children and her neighbours held her in high esteem,” being described later by a Lichfield resident as “blessed with good understanding.” As bad as Samuel remembered his parents’ relationship, Reade reckons that, “to the world they probably appeared, and some would even say they were, an ordinarily happy couple.”

He is also one of very few writers to say nice things about Tetty. That she was a woman of shrewd judgement and a satirical sense of humour. What’s more, he described Samuel’s friends at the time reckoning that he was punching above his weight. She was also from a pretty privileged background and one of her ancestors was the brilliantly named Sir Marmaduke Darrell.

The book finishes with an interesting conclusion. For many people, Samuel Johnson is a Londoner but Reade re-enforces his provincial background. Johnson was enmeshed in connections, both friendly and familiar spread all around the Midlands. He came from a Midlands town, married a Midlands wife and his closest connection in London were from the Midlands. It wasn’t until his late 30s that he fully let go any ambition to be a teacher in the Midlands and became a London writer. It’s an important part of who he was and a part often forgotten. 

I’m so glad for these books, and this volume is definitely the most accessible of them. I think it’s probably required reading for any serious Johnson-dorks, but I’d understand why the more casual Johnsonian may give it a miss.