Bentley Gently

One of the literary forms that has always given me most pleasure, in between the serious stuff, has been the clerihew, named after its inventor Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956). Bentley was chief leader writer for the Daily Telegraph from 1912 to 1934. In 1905, a decade before he produced another of his inventions, the modern detective novel, with Trent’s Last Case, he published a slim volume entitled Biography for Beginners, which opens, under the heading ‘Introductory Remarks’, with this four-liner:

The Art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about Maps, But Biography is about Chaps.

The clerihew, as this form came to be known, is about some famous figure of history or public life, with its first line consisting of that person’s name:

Sir Christopher Wren Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men. If anybody calls Say I am designing St Paul’s.’

I was introduced to the form by my first serious girlfriend and her father, who was a devotee of G. K. Chesterton – the connection will become clear – and immediately fell for the irreverent attitude towards the world that it opened up (this was, after all, the Satirical Sixties). My girlfriend, her father and uncle and I obsessively tried to outdo each other in making up clerihews about everyone we could think of, past or present, famous or family. We would accept only what we judged to be true Bentleyan examples. Biography for Beginners contained forty clerihews, each accompanied by a drawing by G. K. Chesterton, a lifelong friend of Bentley’s. It caught on among – in the author’s words of mild surprise – ‘connoisseurs of idiocy’, with five printings in a relatively short time, and more collections followed in 1929 and 1939. Then in 1951 Clerihews Complete, with over a hundred clerihews, but in fact lacking thirty-four of Bentley’s oeuvre, was published by Werner Laurie, with Victor Reinganum and the author’s son Nicolas Bentley joining the illustration team. The last clerihew in the book, also reproduced on the back of the jacket, is:

Mr Werner Laurie Is not at all sorry He undertook the publication Of this instructive compilation

with a drawing of a prancing Mr Werner Laurie, hand held behind his back Morecambe-wise, joyfully throwing his hat in the air. A bibliographical oddity of this edition is that although it contains a contents list and an index, the pages are unnumbered. The ‘Index of Psychology’, with terms such as ‘Bankruptcy, moral’, ‘Figure, anxiety about’, ‘Horticulture, pitfalls of ’, and so on, is cross-referenced simply to persons. (After many years of feverish searching I have finally faced up to the task of hand-paginating my copy of this eccentric book and embarking on a supplementary paginated index of persons.) Bentley sought to encapsulate the whole life or character of his subject, calling his verses ‘biographies’. The title-page of Biography for Beginners bears the legend: ‘Being a Collection of Miscellaneous Examples for the Use of Upper Forms with 40 diagrams by G. K. Chesterton’. However, despite the mock-educational presentation and air of insouciant erudition, many of Bentley’s clerihews actually have little ‘content’ to speak of, merely picking on some random though characteristic detail, real or imagined, of the subject’s life. But there can be subtle play with known biographical detail, as the above example on Wren shows in its echo of the architect’s insistence on concealment of each main part of St Paul’s while it was being built, so that no one could see what he was doing and try to stop him. No one who is with me so far could ever again, if they ever did, confuse the clerihew with the limerick, which, believe it or not, many do. The clerihew is chaste and, to be quite honest, essentially intellectual, whereas the limerick is a thing of the street, and often very rude. And the metrical distinction between the two is obvious. Every native English-speaker has the rhythm of the limerick in his or her blood, completely regular and predictable, but every one of Bentley’s clerihews finds a different way of having two or sometimes three stresses per line. The form ‘consists of two metrically awkward couplets’, as the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms severely has it. Sometimes the name may conclude the first couplet, as in one of my very favourites:

Few Romans were as tony as The elegant Petronius. None who dressed snappier Appeared on the Via Appia.

Sometimes the master takes a plethora of syllables in the second couplet to the utmost limit (though here with poetic effect):

I regard Zinghis Khan As rather an over-rated man. What, after all, could be easier Than conquering from the Pacific to Silesia?

To get the full flavour of this, you need to have a good look at the drawing. And also at a pre-Second World War map (even if you’re not a Chap). Both words and picture capture British sensibility at the height of empire. Well might the top-hatted, waistcoated, bewhiskered gentleman on his way to the club, his consciousness filled with his world-wide empire, look down his nose at the awestruck little warrior he encounters, with a bow and arrow and not even any armour, only a helmet. Bentley’s illustrators, in fact, are no mere servers of seasoning. They vividly bring out the mood of each verse, and in the editions published in his lifetime it is the drawings that occupy pride of place on recto pages, with the verses arranged in the manner of captions opposite. However, Bentley’s clerihews can be enjoyed through recitation alone, as I have often found when trying to be entertaining at odd moments seized with companions at the dinner table, the breakfast table, in an aircraft (come to think of it, a cruise ship would be ideal), or even in an auditorium in those unoccupied seconds before a performance begins. Bentley soon saw the composition of clerihews joining that of limericks, bouts-rimés and so on as a fashionable Edwardian parlour game. He seemed gently amused by the large number of those composing, and even publishing, in the form. It was suggested to him some time after the publication of his second collection in 1929 that ‘if imitation clerihews were so popular, there should be some measure of tolerance for another collection from the original factory’. His response was: ‘I am not sure that it necessarily follows: people have been known to prefer an imitation to the original: there is a large public, I have heard, for a sort of coffee that has had the caffeine taken out of it.’ It isn’t hard to make up clerihews, although, of course, one never attains classical brilliance. I have had enormous fun with them at Christmas dinners and other occasions with family and close friends; putting a clerihew about each person in an envelope at their place and getting a neighbour to read it out. Topicality can be assured by discreet preliminary research with those closest to the subject.

* * *

Now, an amazing thing. In 1981 the librarian of St Paul’s School, which Bentley attended with G. K. Chesterton in the early 1890s, heard of Oxford University Press’s plans for a new complete edition of Bentley’s clerihews, and showed the publishers the notebook, dated 1893, in which Bentley, from around the age of 16, had written a large number of clerihews of his own composition and a few by school friends, each page bearing three verses and decorated with Chesterton’s humorous and fantastic sketches. On leaving school Bentley had given the notebook to one of these friends, Maurice Solomon, and it had disappeared for sixty years, though its existence became public knowledge in 1940 with Bentley’s description of it in his autobiography Those Days. On Solomon’s death in 1954 his widow had donated it to St Paul’s School Library. Rather than add its largely unknown, and uneven, contents to the new collected edition, the Oxford Press published it just as it was in facsimile, entitled The First Clerihews, in 1982, following the new Complete Clerihews of E. Clerihew Bentley of 1981. Preparing Biography for Beginners for publication in 1905, Bentley, not having access to the notebook he had given away, relied on memory for the wording of the score or so of clerihews from it that he chose to include in B for B, usually improving them, alongside ones written since he had left school. Had he had the notebook to hand he might have included more from it in this first publication. Say (though he might have done a little better here with his history):

It was not Napoleon Who founded the Ashmolean. He never had the chance, Living mostly in France.

But some of the very best ‘biographies’ he ever published are here in this compendium of teenage foolery:

It looked bad when the Duke of Fife Left off using a knife; But people began to talk When he left off using a fork.

The First Clerihews includes a long excerpt from Bentley’s autobiography in which he describes how he and his friends began writing these verses. They were an extremely serious lot, the founder-members of the Junior Debating Club: ‘Nothing quite so preposterous had occupied our attention before.’ The same excerpt includes a classic passage of pure theory which Bentley himself didn’t always stick to: ‘One has to depict the man as he was, not his achievement only. . . ’, and he cites one of his own throw-outs:

Louis Quatorze Had a penchant for wars. He sent Turenne to the Palatinate With instructions to flatten it.

He calls another throw-out – almost as brilliantly rhymed –‘fatally defective’, and he might have applied these comments equally to ‘Louis Quatorze’: ‘Truthful and reliable – yes, even slavishly so. But where is the human appeal? Where the probing psychological touch?’ He goes on to quote the following as an ideal example of the form, although he doesn’t know who the author is:

The Emperor Pertinax Possessed a certain axe With which he used to strike Those whom he did not like.

This he calls ‘an admirable presentation, not of the Emperor as he played his part on the world’s stage, but of the man as he was known to those nearest and most intimate – a spirit by nature impatient, hasty, temperamental if you will; but sincere, direct, honest, in essence lovable’. One would have been fascinated to read his alter ego’s Daily Telegraph leaders . . . Clerihew competitions have long been held in literary weeklies, as Bentley was fond of noting. Here are two of his favourite prizewinners. From Bentley’s old school friend E. W. Fordham:

Miss Mae West Was one of the best. I would rather not Say the best what.

And one from ‘my son, N. C. Bentley’:

Mr Cecil B. de Mille, Sorely against his will, Was persuaded to leave Moses Out of the Wars of the Roses.

The heyday of the clerihew was undoubtedly the first three decades of the last century, that moment in British history when a sense of natural superiority to the rest of the world underlay a relaxed frivolity, whatever the international situation. Today we are far more earnest, unmeditative, forever seeking relevance. But Bentley’s clerihews, and those of the best composed by others of his circle and under his spell, still provide wonderful entertainment, with that ‘preposterous idiocy’ that can so enhance life.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 16 © Antony Wood 2007