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Amanda Theunissen on Caryl Brahms & S. J. Simon, Don’t, Mr Disraeli! & No Bed for Bacon

Playing it for Laughs

You read a book, laugh a lot, recommend it to your friends. Some laugh, others don’t. Why is a sense of humour so individual and at the same time so culturally specific? We are mostly moved to the same emotional responses by tragedy, but we don’t laugh at the same things and I’ve always wondered why. There are many kinds of humour and life would be intolerable without it, but as society changes, so humour changes too. We still weep at old Greek tragedies – but laugh at old Greek comedies? Not so much.

So it’s a rare treat to find comic books written a while ago that still work. In the 1940s two wonderful writers called Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon collaborated on two such novels. Their aim was to make people laugh when there was nothing much to laugh at, and if ever those kinds of books were needed, it’s now. The two had written successful comic detective stories like Bullet in the Ballet before the war, but Don’t, Mr Disraeli! (1940) and No Bed for Bacon (1941) were their first highly unreliable rearrangements of British history. They were very funny then and are very funny now, at least I think so.

I inherited my 1963 copy of Don’t, Mr Disraeli! from my father. It’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet transferred to a glorious Victorian age that never existed, though one wishes it had. It is totally inconsequential: I can’t even begin to explain the plot, not that it matters. The basis is the feud between the middle-class Clutterwick and Shuttleforth families, and what happens when Julian Clutterwick (who looks just like John Gielgud) and Julia Shuttleforth (‘I’d forget him more easily if he didn’t look so like John Gielgud’) fall in love and want to marry.

That’s just the start. Threads of other stories criss-cross, peopled by credulous uncles, ferocious aunts, observant crossing sweepers, armies of loyal servants, a scheming French governess and all sorts of running gags that

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You read a book, laugh a lot, recommend it to your friends. Some laugh, others don’t. Why is a sense of humour so individual and at the same time so culturally specific? We are mostly moved to the same emotional responses by tragedy, but we don’t laugh at the same things and I’ve always wondered why. There are many kinds of humour and life would be intolerable without it, but as society changes, so humour changes too. We still weep at old Greek tragedies – but laugh at old Greek comedies? Not so much.

So it’s a rare treat to find comic books written a while ago that still work. In the 1940s two wonderful writers called Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon collaborated on two such novels. Their aim was to make people laugh when there was nothing much to laugh at, and if ever those kinds of books were needed, it’s now. The two had written successful comic detective stories like Bullet in the Ballet before the war, but Don’t, Mr Disraeli! (1940) and No Bed for Bacon (1941) were their first highly unreliable rearrangements of British history. They were very funny then and are very funny now, at least I think so. I inherited my 1963 copy of Don’t, Mr Disraeli! from my father. It’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet transferred to a glorious Victorian age that never existed, though one wishes it had. It is totally inconsequential: I can’t even begin to explain the plot, not that it matters. The basis is the feud between the middle-class Clutterwick and Shuttleforth families, and what happens when Julian Clutterwick (who looks just like John Gielgud) and Julia Shuttleforth (‘I’d forget him more easily if he didn’t look so like John Gielgud’) fall in love and want to marry. That’s just the start. Threads of other stories criss-cross, peopled by credulous uncles, ferocious aunts, observant crossing sweepers, armies of loyal servants, a scheming French governess and all sorts of running gags that don’t advance the plot, such as it is, but are an essential element of the fun. The authors are much given to addressing the reader directly, particularly when so deeply embroiled that a resolution seems impossible. It could be called post-modernism, but I’m sure Brahms and Simon just thought it was a good joke. Everything is in the melting pot. Time is definitely fluid, ushering in a cast of hundreds, including Victoria herself at whatever age suits the exigencies of the story, and the eponymous Mr Disraeli, his behaviour and ideas earning the reproof of the title. I can’t do better than quote the authors’ own ‘Explanation’:

This is not a novel set in the Victorian Age; it is a novel set in its literature . . . and any event in this period may come into focus, bearing no relation to the date at which it happened. This treaty with time has enabled the authors to prolong the lives of some famous men and women and allow others to live before they have yet been born and introduce some beloved giants from our own age.

So anachronistic figures drift in and out, including Noël Coward, George Gershwin, Henry James, Compton Mackenzie, James Agate and assorted members of the Savage Club, as well as the book’s publisher, Michael Joseph (so mean with his advances and advertising), and Albert Einstein and his father, always worrying about Albert’s obsession with numbers. The Marx Brothers play a large part, Harpo chasing terrified blondes whenever more mayhem is needed. The moustachioed villain, much given to cracking his whip while evicting widows and orphans and trying to seduce our heroine, is clearly Groucho. The plot demands that he murder one of the credulous uncles. ‘A capital scheme, decides our villain, he will make a rendezvous forthwith. He reaches for the telephone. Curses! It will not be invented for another thirty years.’ Who were the authors known as Brahms and Simon? Both were Jewish and their fantastical lives read like something from their own books. Caryl, born and bred in Croydon (her grandparents were Turkish Sephardic immigrants), was christened Doris Caroline Abrahams and was destined by her parents to be a concert pianist. However, being, as she said, a natural critic, she couldn’t bear the noise she made, so changed her name to Caryl Brahms (which she thought gender neutral) and reinvented herself as a ballet critic and comic writer. S. J. Simon, born Seca Jaca Skidelsky in Manchuria in 1900, arrived in England as a child. Universally known as Skid, he was a journalist and writer, but until the success of Don’t, Mr Disraeli! he earned his living teaching bridge: he was a world-class international player. He died in 1948 and his obituaries mistakenly called Caryl his wife, but they weren’t even lovers. They were friends and collaborators for twenty years, producing twelve books, plays, revue songs, captions for strip cartoons – and they swore at the end of each one that they would never join forces again. In her diary Caryl wrote: ‘Finished DMD today. Emptied an ashtray over Skid’s head, been longing to do it for ages.’ After his death, Caryl wrote on her own until 1954 when she met Ned Sherrin, the TV producer and writer, who became her second and last collaborator. She was happier working in a team, always maintaining she was not witty herself but the cause of wit in others. Don’t, Mr Disraeli! was Brahms and Simon’s first major success – an old lady wrote claiming to clearly remember an incident in it which the authors had invented – and their publisher (the long-suffering Michael Joseph) wanted another book just like it. But repetition wasn’t their style and No Bed for Bacon was what they came up with. Set in Elizabethan England, it centres on the young Shakespeare and the London theatre world, which they saw as much like the London theatre world they both knew. It’s more straightforward than Don’t, Mr Disraeli! and possibly better written, full of casual learning, unsentimental history and patriotism, and great gaiety. The authors prefaced it with a ‘Warning to Scholars: This book is fundamentally unsound.’ My copy is subtitled ‘The story of Shakespeare and Lady Viola in love’, which is a bit cheeky because it was only added to the new edition – which appeared in 1999, the year of the film Shakespeare in Love. In Ned Sherrin’s preface he mentions lending his copy to Tom Stoppard before the latter began work on the film’s screenplay. Film and book have the same plot – beautiful stage-struck Lady Viola dresses as a boy and gets to act with the young Shakespeare at the Globe; they fall in love but have to part, and all ends slightly sadly. Substitute Romeo and Juliet for Twelfth Night and the homage (Sherrin’s word) to the novel in the film is clear. But Brahms and Simon present the world of Elizabeth herself, her politics, her court, and of Elizabethan theatre in their own effortless anachronistic style. Backstage at the Globe Francis Bacon (who is desperate to acquire as an investment one of the many beds the Queen has slept in) is insisting Shakespeare use his, Bacon’s, suggestions to improve Twelfth Night. The playwright is not happy.

Shakespeare sprang to his feet. ‘Master Bacon,’ he demanded passionately, ‘do I write my plays or do you?’ Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.

Brahms and Simon have fun pushing ideas in the Bard’s direction. Want to know how genius works? Amid the backstage chaos of the Globe, Elizabethan clown Obadiah Croke is demanding to play a comic gravedigger; a young actor chips in.

‘Master Will,’ said the boy beseechingly, ‘I want to drown myself . . . I wish to go mad . . . and sing wild songs.’ Shakespeare tasted the idea. ‘A mad maid who drowns herself. It’s a very good idea.’ He tasted it again. ‘Dramatic.’ ‘But first,’ said the boy, ‘I shall need to be betrayed.’

Add the old trouper who yearns to be a groaning ghost, the financial backer’s view that most people should die at the end, and with a bit more work on the plot – there you have it: Hamlet. B & S were very conscious of venturing on to hallowed ground with Shakespeare but also understood that not every part of every play is a masterpiece and much of the now incomprehensible Elizabethan humour and wordplay doesn’t have to be treated like Holy Writ. My favourite is a really terrible B & S joke that sounds perfectly authentic when told by the court jester:

Question: What is it that stands on the roof at midnight and crows like a cock? Answer: A Tom O’Bedlam.

Queen Elizabeth doesn’t find it funny – she throws her wig at the hapless courtier who tells it, but as parody it’s perfect. It could be inserted seamlessly into Edgar’s ravings in King Lear or any rustic comedy sequence. No Bed for Bacon was extremely successful. Even with wartime paper shortages it went into a second printing in a week. One review called it ‘irresponsible, irreverent, impudent, and undocumented – one of the soundest books in years’. In her memoirs Caryl Brahms says proudly that they knew the German prisoner-of-war camps established a waiting-list ahead of publication. After the war she met Ronald Searle, a survivor of the Japanese camps, who told her there was always a queue of prisoners asking for the latest B & S. Rereading the two books yet again, I find new things to laugh at and old friends to greet. But I’m baffled by two characters in Don’t, Mr Disraeli! There are two critics – one round and podgy, the other dark and cadaverous – who meet every week to exchange carefully honed spontaneous bon mots such as:

‘What did you think of the new Ibsen?’ ‘Bricks without Shaw.’

I’m sure they are real people, carefully described and recognizable, but I can’t work out who they are. If any knowledgeable reader can, please put me out of my misery. A postcard c/o Slightly Foxed will find me.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64 © Amanda Theunissen 2019


About the contributor

Amanda Theunissen is a television producer who’s giving up serious literature for the duration of the current political upheaval, to escape into a frivolous world where true love is rewarded and people can make jokes.

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