The TLS blog

The best book loan in literary history?

I offered to lend a friend a book today.

He refused. Borrowing was too much trouble. Or rather returning borrowed books was too much trouble.

It never did anyone any good, he said.

'Neither borrower nor lender be' was a motto especially appropriate to literature.

I started to protest that one of the greatest poems in English had resulted from a borrowed book - and not a just a book from any lender but from a lender who was a journalist on The Times.

I tried to tell him about the suicide of Thomas Alasager in 1846 but he was already on line to Amazon.

Thomas Massa Alsager was one of those 19th-century newspaper figures whose versatility puts every one of us, his modern successors, to shame. He was a manager, a music critic, a city editor, an advertising salesman and he was also midwife to John Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

He lent Keats the book.

It was in 1816 when Keats looked for the first time into a translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by George Chapman, the Jacobean poet and dramatist.

Chapman's grand barbarism, as has often been recounted, was in shocking contrast to the refined Homeric lines of Alexander Pope, the ``smooth little toys'' on which Keats and his friends had been brought up.

Chapman's Homer lit a beacon for Romantic poetry. So the actual copy of Chapman's Homer, the one which made possible this transforming work for Keats and for English letters, was one of the most important book borrowings of all time.

Alsager's primary Times job was as business manager. He was a clothworker by birth and his colleagues used to ask why dealing in canvas, or ``floorcloth'', as it was known, gave him a right to talk about art as well as counting the cash

But he did write about art, became a close friend of Charles Lamb, learnt to play almost every instrument in the orchestra, and sponsored the first English performance of Beethoven's Mass in D. He also founded The Times's City office and invented revolutionary methods of filing copy from home and foreign parts.

He may have combined art and finance too much. He died in 1846v by slitting his own throat after accusations that he was over-creative with the accounts.

His nerves had previously been ``made of packthread . . . proof against weather, ingratitude, meat-under-done, every weapon of fate'', according to a letter written to one of his other enthusiasms, William Wordsworth. But, as D.E. Wickham wrote in a 1981 essay for the Charles Lamb Society, this strong protective ``impassibility'' deserted him after his disgrace.

Alsager had a miserable end, dying nine days after he had first gashed his wrist and throat. He was 67. It was 30 years since he had provided the 1616 folio of Chapman which, with its ``loud and bold'' voice, launched Keats into the most creative phase of his life and inspired millions to see what is stunning and new in the world around them.

That was still an era when, except for book collectors, those amateurs who stood astride the worlds of finance and art, there could often be no access to texts. Alsager's folio, as Robert Gittings describes in his 1968 biography of Keats, was even then too valuable to be risked among the thieves' kitchens of Southwark, and had to be read in an all-night session in the safety of Clerkenwell.
``Much have I travell'd in the Realms of Gold . . .'', wrote Keats on his return home, and the rest is literary history. As soon as he had looked into Chapman's Homer, he had a new language, a new confidence to look out into the countryside of his mind.

"Then felt I like some Watcher of the Skies

When a new Planet swims into his Ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with Eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific and all his Men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a Peak in Darien."

Of course, as critics have never ceased to point out, Keats made a mistake in his rapid, bleary-eyed composition after a hard Clerkenwell night. The Pacific was not discovered by Cortez but by Balboa.

 We can be sure that Alsager would have been understanding of this: his was a life, like that of all journalists in which vital accuracy did sometimes have to be sacrificed to speed.

And if any one has lent a book to better effect, I can't think of it now.

Ben Macintyre's lightly buried treasure

In prisoner-of-war camps or places where terrorists' hostages are held, a page or two of old newspaper is the greatest treasure.

I'm not in quite that state today. But the broadband is down, the newsagent is far away and the radio ruminates about the Lockerbie bomber without telling me anything that I don't know.

So I  am reading old Times columns about the English language written by the ever gently erudite Ben Macintyre.

Bloomsbury publishers have just reissued the best of them. So, I'm not shuffling yellow newsprint here.

In The Last Word, Tales from the Tip of the Mother Tongue, I'm reminding myself who or what was Humpty Dumpty and whether Mary, Mary Quite Contrary was originally Mary Tudor (with a garden of bells and shells and other torture implements) or Mary Stuart (with an adoring entourage of little maids all in a row).

TLS readers have been following the legal battle over whether J.D California can publish a sequel in the US to Catcher in the Rye. Not at the moment it seems, though I can't see that decision lasting long.

Macintyre reminds me that the killer of John Lennon, and assorted other would-be big-league assassins, thought that they were living the life of Salinger's hero - and lightly speculates over not just a writer's ownership of a character but his responsibility for what is done in that character's name.

I've twice already used the word 'remind'. The comfort of this kind of article is that it does make you think you knew its content already and just needed to be prodded softly into recollection. Even first-time-around in the newspaper they were calming.

In fact, I may not have known the answers - to the origin of 'portmanteau words' or to the question of whether 'pomegranate' rhymes with 'immigrant' in Australian and can explain the origins of 'whinging Poms'. Not so whinging at the val cricket ground today, my dear Australian friends.

I might have known that a handbook of how to enslave women called The Chronicles of Gor was cult sixties fictional sucess - and that a Darlington butcher had recently refused to serve a cult adherent who took his slave on a chain to help him buy bacon. But then I might easily not have known that.

Humpty Dumpty? That story of the civil war cannon which fell off a Colchester wall? Too good to be true if one were applying TLS principles. But heck. It's a Sunday morning. The effortlessness of Macintyre's prose guarantess that a little reminding is all that's needed for hours of pleasure. The Ashes are heading home. Even the broadband is back up. So I can post this note.

Harem revolt

  In 1542 England and China were both ruled by paranoid, murderous tyrants with all the usual anxieties about sex, health and the legitimacy of their regimes.

But in any contest over who could kill the most sexual partners, Henry VIII would have fallen far behind the Emperor Jiajing.

While Henry obsessed about the health of his male heir, Jiajing thought that his own eternal health and youth was much the higher priority.

To that end he had a policy of carving body parts out of his concubines and mixing the results with other wholesome drugs from the distant parts of his empire.

In the year that Henry was merely executing Catherine Howard, the women of the Chinese court decided that enough royal scalpeling was enough.

The harem heroines made a fight for freedom, attempting to strangle their lord and master with hair ribbons.

The revolt was not, however, a success. Concubine-training had not demanded sufficient attention to slip-knots.

After executing all his bedroom plotters, Jiajing's general lifestyle continued to serve him rather well. He ruled for 46 years, eight more than even Henry managed. 

He had a much bolder approach to legitimacy issues than the Tudors. He was not the son of the previous Emperor but, rather than have himself adopted into the direct line of succession, he declared that his own father had, in fact, been the Emperor all along.

The homelife of Jiajing's living pharmacies forms a chilling chapter in Susan Barker's forthcoming novel, The Beijing Taxi Driver, published in the latest issue of the excellent Pen Pusher Magazine.

Wine, women and songbirds

My best friend in Connecticut has a passionate concern for animal welfare which is normally directed at the abuse of elephants in circuses.

She has, however, briefly lowered her sights to smaller creatures of the kind that are of greater concern to me.

So, thanks to her, I now know a little more about the fighting finches and canaries of her state (see previous posts) and can answer all questions about how the police could tell that the little birds were fighters and how the gamblers got their subjects to do their pecking.

Some of the saffron finches seized by police had sharpened beaks, it is claimed. At least one beak had a sharp metal object attached. That seems suspicious.

The search of the house in Shelton also revealed superglue, antibiotics, skin and blood supplements, a miniature digital scale and powders that are still being tested.

Were these to treat the injured birds or to increase their stamina to fight? No one is quite sure.

Since only one bird had the sharp piece of metal attached to its beak, there is maybe an extreme-sport version of canary fighting, a grande finale after a night of mere drug-induced pecks. Or maybe it was a living tin-opener.

In addition to alcohol and illegal weaponry, sex was deployed. Female canaries perched in a separate pen above the fighting cage were used to incite the males. Acotrding to the owner of the house, 42-year-old Jurames Goulart, all the birds were kept for singing. Either way, it seems, an avian Vegas,

Police said that they made the arrests on July 26 just as spectators had placed bets and were getting ready to watch the birds fight at the home. Authorities say they seized $8,000 in alleged betting money.The 19 people charged were all originally from Brazil.

Perhaps we have to turn for further answers to Rio readers. 

Ten dollars on the green canary

How do Connecticans make canaries fight?

Royson comments on my Cape Cod vacation post that a tot of alcohol will do the trick.

A drink makes the bird a little liverish and late-on-friday-night-feeling it seems.

Alternatively, show them Tweety cartoons on a continuous loop until they go berserk?

That is one suggestion from Connecticut Bob and his commenters, folk who are properly upset by the ill repute that the prize-fighting canary ring has brought upon their great state.

(Lest we get too sanctimonious about this, my learned friend Paul Blezard reminds us that it was long common to take canaries down our coal mines. When the cage-bird could no longer sing to the Maya Angelou tune, it was time to get out.)

Perhaps a real pet cat could help boost the avian fighting spirit. Or sing “Eye of the Tiger” to the little feathered pugilist?

Teach your bird to bob along with “Hair of the Dog”?

The illegal gambling ring - with birds and cash already for a good Connecticut night in - was actually discovered by police near Shelton's Dogwood Road.

176 Ripton, if you're thinking of a sightsee.

But who cares? One pet is much like another in cage-bird-fighting country.

Roosters make too much noise.

Dogs are too expensive.

Cheetah-wrestling? Fox-boxing?

Imaginative leaps too far?

And bears haven't been freely available in Hartford for some while.

I wonder if the Renaissance Italians, the men who pioneered the breeding of pet canaries, ever thought of a flutter on a 'green vs yellow' match.

According to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 'green' would normally be the better bet, being 'more robust' and closer to their cousins in the wild.

There is also a tip here for breeders. Put a male with five females  and he always prefers the one he had sex with first.

But if you're looking for future champions, choose the eggs from his later conquests.

Gaol-birds, please note.

What I didn't read on my holiday

When this blog began three years ago (or was it four?. . I'm on holiday and I forget) the instructions from the webmeister were that it must continue every week of the year, from wherever I happened to be, lest, like a neglected pet or plant, it might whither and die.

For all these blogging years I've followed this command.

 But this past fortnight has not been one to be proud of.

One post in two weeks - and that about fighting canaries in Connecticut - has been a poor show.

'Just write about what you're reading', the webmeister had said. 'How hard can that be?'

It didn't sound too hard.

Even a few weeks ago it didn't sound too hard.

When the Toronto Globe and Mail asked me what I'd be reading on vacation, I gave a crisp, confident  account of how the poems of Joseph Brodsky were on my mind and how a deck on Cape Cod would be just the place to unravel a few problems therein.

But I haven't blogged on Brodsky  because I haven't read any Brodsky here.

In the first day or two I  did read Lermontov's A Hero Of Our Time in a  new Oneworld Classic Edition. But I must have left it somewhere and two weeks later can only remember one line.

That's the one  when the hero says that 'I love my enemies though not in the Christian way'. The love of having enemies for their very hatability is a much underrated passion and a good basis for following American politics at all seasons.

After that I found a good Eric Ambler thriller from 1939, The Mask of Dimitrios, just republished by Penguin, packed with useful history from the Balkans.

And then a bad Eric Ambler from 1937, Uncommon Danger, which has an absurd plot about Romania and an implausible journalist hero.

After that nothing at all.

I must have become very adaptable in later middle age. No one much reads books here or talks about them . So neither do I.  

Normal service, drawn from what I'm sure will be a brilliant new issue of the TLS, will resume next week.