Nothing Compares...

Yesterday, I heard Nothing Compares 2U playing on the radio and I was reminded of how bloody fantastic the first line is.

I've mentioned before that I think first lines are overrated things, but they have a job; indeed they have a couple of jobs. There are two things that a first line should do. First: it should establish something important. The sky was blue and the grass was green is a bad first line because it could be prefixed to almost any story without adding anything (unless your hero is colour-blind).

The other thing that a first line should do is throw the reader off slightly. Only slightly. There's always a danger that a chap will settle down to appreciate your book, and books should not be appreciated, they should be experienced.

You don't want your reader to appreciate that your joke is funny, you want him to laugh. You don't want your reader to appreciate your plot-twists, you want him to be startled. This problem is horribly acute when the reader picks up the book for the first time, because of course he is probably going to use his judgement of your first line to decide whether to continue. So you need to, as it were, pull his seat of judgement out from under him.

But here's the paradox: if you do that too obviously, the reader is likely to say 'Oh! How wonderfully unexpected! He's pulled my seat of judgement out from under me in a very clever way.'

This is a failure. So you must be cunning. You need to be subtle. That's why Call me Ishmael is the best first line in history. On the surface, nothing has happened. The main character is called Ishmael. Onwards to the second sentence.

But he's not named in a normal way. The first line is not My name is Ishmael. It's Call me Ishmael. Most readers don't notice that the narrator of Moby Dick is anonymous. Instead, a sort of ad hoc deal is set up between narrator and reader that Ishmael is the name we shall use, but that for all we know he's really called Brian.

And the vital thing is that that ad hoc deal is set up just quickly enough and just subtly enough that the reader barely notices. He's on the second sentence, but somewhere at the back of his mind there's that nagging feeling that something is wrong.

The same thing goes with It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Right ho! On to the second sentence, barely wondering whether this is a statement of truth (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the sun rises in the East) or of satire (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if a girl doesn't have a Gucci handbag she might as well be dead). Is this the omniscient or sarcastic narrator? Does Jane believe this, or is she laughing at those who do?

Subtle. The reader barely notices, but they are that much less able to stand in dissociated judgement.

Which brings me around to the song by Prince, first recorded by The Family, and made famous by Sinead O'Connor. It's not on a level with Melville or Austen, but it's damn close.

It's been seven hours and fifteen days
Since you took your love away.

All Prince did was to reverse the usual order of weights and measures. Most people start with the largest - three pounds and fifty pence, eleven stone and six ounces, fifteen days and seven hours.

It's hardly a dramatic shift. Seven hours and fifteen days is quite comprehensible, you might not notice. But it's enough to tip you off balance so subtly that you don't even notice your fall. Moreover - and this is the beauty of it - it establishes the character. After the first two lines the rest of the song is barely necessary. It's somebody who split up with his girlfriend* more than a fortnight ago, but is still counting their separation in hours. That's why they're listed first.

That's all you need to know about the poor fellow: lovelorn enough that his measurements are reversed. And the real beauty is that the listener might never notice that all that information has been conveyed in the first seven words.

It's enough to make you forgive the 2U instead of To You.

Almost enough.



*Working from the original version.

Pilgarlic

As I was preparing my late and lenten supper last night, I was reminded of the word pilgarlic. You see, I was peeling garlic at the time. Have you ever peeled garlic? Does that smooth, shiny surface remind you of anything? Yul Brynner, perhaps?

Let's look at the evidence:

Do you see what I mean? A pilgarlic is an ancient and derogatory term for a bald man. It was invented by John Skelton who once wrote:

Your peeled-garlic head
Could occupy there no stead.

And has been used off and on ever since. As late as 1978 the Oxford Times wrote:

BBC 1 offers those pilgarlic gentlemen Yul Brynner (in an adventure movie) and Telly Savalas (as Kojak).

But despite the continued absenteeism of hair, the word has fallen, unjustly into disuse. This is actually rather useful, as, if you call a chap a pilgarlic to his face, he probably won't understand what you mean.

Yul in his pre-pilgarlic days

Beer Lane

Another in the series of pub poems (previous entries here and here). This one is from the Lamb on Lamb's Conduit Street in Bloomsbury. The picture is Hogarth's Beer Street, the lesser-known sister of Gin Lane, and the poem runs thusly:

Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
Can sinewy Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
Can chear each manly Heart.

Labour and Art upheld by Thee
Successfully advance,
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
And Water leave to France.

Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
Rivals the Cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous Breast
With Liberty and Love.

And Chear is spelled like that. This picture and rhyme are not as obscure as the previous entries, and as my picture was rather shaky and disturbed by reflection, here is a good copy from the Internet.

P.S. If you see a poem up in a pub, do send it in.

Morris Dancing and Othello

Pausing on Lamb's Conduit Street yestereve I saw a troop of Morris dancers waving their sticks about. For those of you who have never seen or heard of morris dancing, it's the most traditional olde-worlde, merrie-Englande form of folk dancing. Except it's not English. It's Arab.

Morris is a corruption of Moorish (via Morisk). Moorish is of or pertaining to the Moors and Moor is an old word for an Arab.

Well, in fact, Moor used to be used indiscriminately to mean Arab, negro, Indian, Muslim or pretty much anything that originated from beyond Kent. That's why nobody, to this day, is quite sure whether Othello, the Moor of Venice, was meant to be black (as we would understand the term) or Arab.

The dance that I witnessed yesterday has been called a Morisk, Moresque, Moorish or Morris dance since the fifteenth century. So I assume that it was Othello's favourite jig.

Moor itself comes from Mauritania which was the ancient name for Morocco, although, weirdly Morocco doesn't have anything to do with Moor.

Nor does Moorish, meaning Arabian, have anything to do with More-ish meaning appetite-whetting, a fact that was lost on the writers of a wine list in a restaurant I once visited. Here is a rather blurry photo:

A Scotsman once told Arnold Bax that "You should make a point of trying every experience once, except incest and folk-dancing." This phrase is usually now repeated with the folk replaced by Morris. But poor Desdemona would tell you that you should also strike from the list a dangerously Moorish husband.

The hankerchiefs were all stolen from Desdemona

Fits and Starts and Leaps and Bounds

An American* chap called Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday in which he lyrically waxed upon the origins of things like liberty and the rule of law, but not upon the origins of phrases. It was his analysis of developing economies that caught my ear:

And that is why countries like China, India and Brazil are growing so rapidly -- because in fits and starts, they are moving towards the market-based principles that the United States and the United Kingdom have always embraced.

Because:

Countries like China, India, and Brazil are growing by leaps and bounds.

Fits and starts and leaps and bounds! What strenuous movements!

Fits and starts goes back to a sermon of 1620 by a chap called Robert Sanderson who compares Christian virtue to actually having a fit thusly:

A man of a cold complexion hath as much heat in a sharp fit of an ague, as he that is of a hot constitution, and in health, and more too; his blood is more inflamed, and he burneth more. But whether do you think is the more kindly heat, that which cometh from the violence of a fever, or that which ariseth from the condition of a man's temper? . . . Then for constancy and lasting,—if the heat come by fits, and starts, and paroxysms, leaping eftsoons and suddenly out of one extreme into another, so as the party one while gloweth as hot as fire, another while is chill and cold as ice, and keepeth not at any certain stay, that is an ill sign too, and it is to be feared there is an ague either bred, or in breeding...

Personally, I do everything by fits and starts, except for having a fit, which I do constantly. I live in a semi-permanent fit of poetic inspiration, which is no good, because as Nicolas Boileau pointed out in his L'Art Poetique:

A Poem, where we all Perfections find,
Is not the work of a fantastick [crazy] Mind:
There must be Care, and Time, and Skill and Pains;
Nor the first heat of unexperienced Brains.
Yet sometimes artless Poets, when the rage
Of a warm Fancy does their Minds engage,
Puff'd with the vain Pride, presume they understand,
And boldly take the Trumpet in their hand;
Their fustian Muse each Accident confounds;
Nor can she fly, but rise by leaps and bounds,
'Till their small stock of Learning quickly spent,
Their poem dies for want of Nourishment.

Well, obviously that's not what Boileau wrote. He was French, poor chap. But luckily for him John Dryden and Sir William Soames produced that translation in 1694. Which one of them actually wrote the words leaps and bounds is unknown, but I like to think it was Soames as I can't find anything else about him.

Nicolas Boileau's Art of Poetry, even in the Dryden and Soames translation, isn't a classic. Sensible: yes. Famous: no. Voltaire liked it and so did Dr Johnson. But in Dr Johnson's opinion it was nothing as compared to Pope's translation of the Iliad which was (apparently): "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal".

That's absolute hogwash. Chapman's Homer is much better, but we'll let that pass. I've written about Iliad translations before and the only reason I mentioned Pope's was that he uses the phrase leaps and bounds twice: first in the introduction where he says of those who would translate Homer:

Methinks I see these different followers of Homer, some sweating and straining after him by violent leaps and bounds (the certain signs of false mettle), others slowly and servilely creeping in his train, while the poet himself is all the time proceeding with an unaffected and equal majesty before them.

And then in Book 21 when a river is trying to drown Achilles (and no: that shouldn't be passive):

High o'er the surging tide, by leaps and bounds,
He wades, and mounts; the parted wave resounds.
Not a whole river stops the hero's course,
While Pallas fills him with immortal force.

It is Pope's poem that, I suspect, made the phrase famous and slyly inserted into the language. As this blog proved a year ago, Pope is the most quoted English poet by quite some way, even if he is scandalously underread in these seedy times.

So Obama's speech about the basis of democracy is itself based upon John Dryden, Alexander Pope and God.
*Although I have compelling evidence he was actually born in Tring.

A Dildo For A Song

Last night I went to see All's Well That Ends Well at the Globe. A line in the play made me think of the Beatles and Our Mutual Friend.


Clown: By my troth, I take my young lord to be a very melancholy man.


Countess: By what observance, I pray you?


Clown: Why, he will look upon his boot and sing; mend the ruff and sing; ask questions and sing; pick his teeth and sing. I know a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a goodly manor for a song.

What is the connection to the Beatles? Well, it's an obscure aspect of the song Your Mother Should Know (video beneath), the lyrics of which run:

Let's all get up and dance to a song
That was a hit before your mother was born
And though she was born a long, long time ago,
Your mother should know,
Your mother should know.

You see, Paul McCartney's mother was born in 1909, which means that the song was probably a hit in 1908 or earlier, in which case its hittiness would not have been measured in record sales, but in sales of sheet music.

Do you remember Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend? No? Oh well. He's a poor street vendor who develops a rather weird obsession with the occupants of the house outside of which he sells ballads and sheet music.

Sheet music used to be everywhere. Before the gramophone existed it was the only way of obtaining a song for keeps. Hearing a song was no more than hearing a recitation of a poem. If you liked it, you bought it on paper. So selling music was an essential part of everyday life, and the salesmen were (often) the lowest of the low.

The same character, essentially, pops up in A Winter's Tale. Autolycus, who describes himself as "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles", is an itinerant ballad-seller who:

...hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no
milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he
has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without
bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate
burthens of dildos and fadings...

I fear an aside on dildoes is required. The word is first recorded in 1598 meaning exactly what it does today, but it also appeared in lots of ballads as a meaningless refrain. Just as our songs have sha-la-las and yeah-yeah-yeahs, so Elizabethan ballads had fa-la-las, hey-nonny-noes, and dildoes.

All of which brings us full circle to that line from All's Well That Ends Well which is the very first recorded example of selling something for a song. When the melancholy man of whom the clown speaks sold a goodly manor for a song, he was exchanging his real estate for a piece of sheet music because he needed something new to sing.

Perhaps, for the price of his land he got hold of the Roxburghe Ballads, which contain the beautiful lines:

She prov'd herself a Duke's daughter, and he but a Squire's son.
Sing trang dildo lee

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sing trang dildo lee all over London until I get arrested.

Hoodwink

Wink used to mean shut both your eyes for a while. So when Shakespeare wrote:

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.

He wasn't talking about closing one eye in a licentious manner. So what happens if you pull somebody's hood down over their eyes? You blind them and thus hoodwink them.