Peregrine Prykke revisiting

Peregrine Prykke was the name of a keen young critic, fresh to the ‘London literary world’of the early 1970s, whose wide-eyed 'pilgrimage' around pubs, parties and poetry magazines was recorded in rhyming couplets by Clive James in 1974, reissued in an ‘improved version’ in 1976 and included in his 2003 collection, The Book of My Enemy. 

It is the 1976 edition that has been on my desk for the past few days, the orange paper cover faded to white around the spine and a pencil inscription declaring that at some unspecified date its price was lowered from £5 to £3. Inside, however, it is as fresh as ever. Last night I reread the whole thing.

Why? Well, for various reasons associated loosely with the management of the TLS, I’ve been seeing more than usual keen young critics. Although it would have been trite to advise that every one of them should read ‘Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage’ (all were much too smart for such advice: and some may have already translated it into French) I can still urge a new and wider readership for it here.

The hero, Perry, is an early baby-boomer whose mother has an upwardly mobile ambition for her son. His parents, indeed, bear some small resemblance to those of Christopher Hitchens as described in his new memoir, Hitch 22. At Perry's  'Indirect Grant Semi-Public Grammar/ Fee-paying Approved Labour-camp cum Crammer' his early intellectual hero is F.R Looseleaf, master of ‘the Felt Creative Thought/ The Force of Thought, of Life Felt to the Full'.

From that point he is lost. At Cambridge there arrives in his life Doc Stein, master of 'tags in very tongue , alive and dead/ Trinitro-Ruritanian, Infra-Red/ Low-Temperature Etruscan, Serb, Seismography/ Deoxyribose, X-ray,Crystallography’. While F.R. Leavis is sadly dead, George Steiner is fully active back in Cambridge as admiring TLS readers well know. There is a chance here to join him in his most influential middle years.

Cambridge completed, he meets in a Soho pub Ian Hammerhead, his first editor, who passes on his ‘first great principle’ of being commissioned: that ‘I take bitter with my double scotch’. While Ian Hamilton too has passed on to the great bar in the sky, Al Alvarez, who gives Perry excellent financial advice under the name L.L. El Al, is still worth attention from the young. In London today we no longer find ‘Richard Bierstein, rich in jest/ whose task it is empirically to test/ The thousand different kinds and strengths of ale/ Great Britain’s countless pubs have got for sale’.

But with Richard Boston, to general regret, having followed the fate of his sometime literary, ecological magazine, we still, of course, have Seamus Feamus, the now even more famous Nobel Prize winner for poetry, whom James places in the same bar with all the other Belfast poets called Seamus. Marvyn Grabb, the giant of TV arts programmes, graces us still even though the profligacy of the ‘State Arts Hand-out panel’ which organises Festivities for reconciling literary cliques does not – or, anyway, not for much longer.

Roger McGough is now the distinguished presenter of Poetry Please on Radio Four for a Sunday afternoon. But here he can be caught alongside his fellow Liverpudlian, the then very fashionable Brian Patten as “A double-act beneath a sheet of satin/ Complete with cardboard head and frayed rope tail./The Panto Horse from Liverpool! Can’t fail./From each end of the horse line emanated/ Alternately until its case was stated.’

The highlight of Perry’s short literary life (and there! I’ve revealed the end: it is indeed all too literally a short life, tragically concluded after Perry’s debut book of criticism bites some of the hands that have fed him) is a meeting with the acclaimed American Bob Lull at which his flattery is faultless. Yes, we now lack Robert Lowell, Kingsley ‘King Kong’ Amis, Norman ‘Moonbase’ Mailer and Harold ‘Half-Pint’ Pinter too. But a fresh young critic, new to London or a denizen of the literary festival circuit then unknown, may still meet Big John Gross, much revered former editor of the TLS, Greer Garstleigh , Australian compatriot of the author, Mag Scrabble, Clara Tomahawk, Lady Freesia Fruitcake and Kingsley’s son, ‘Kid Kong’, who read the poem at its 1974 premier.

There should surely be a revival, a further  republication, a new improved version of Clive James’s wondrous work. How else will  the young learn their trade?

Comments

[Scott Lahti]

Good old Clive, nothing like him. Benny Hill's spoof of him as "Clive Janes" had me laughing here stateside as a kid 30 years ago.

An update, indeed: one can only wonder under what names he'd add such later arrivals as Craig Raine, Timothy Garton Ash, James Wood, Blake Morrison, Lorna Sage, Marina Warner, Orlando Figes, Simon Schama, David Cannadine, Julian Barnes, Mary Beard, Terry Eagleton, Ferdinand Mount, Paul Muldoon...To borrow Wolcott Gibbs's parody of TIME's inverted sentences ("Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind"), "Where it will all end, knows God." As well as His polymathic, polyglot (like "Doc Stein"), saucy-Aussie literary deputy here on earth.

[Shrdlu Querulantenwahn.]

The dialog that was used as a SHRDLU demo:

Person: PICK UP A BIG RED BLOCK.
Computer: OK. (does it)
Person: GRASP THE PYRAMID.
Computer: I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHICH PYRAMID YOU MEAN.