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Patrick Welland on Robert Nye, Falstaff, Slightly Foxed 77

Oh Sir John!

In 1976, a year remembered in the UK for its blazing summer, publication of a scabrous novel so inflamed a group of academics that they burned copies in the library at Reading University. Less delicate souls embraced the book. It won that year’s Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Guardian Fiction Prize, garnering encomiums from reviewers who struggled to match its exuberant prose. The New York Times called it a ‘fresco of groinwork’; Time Magazine welcomed a ‘swollen, rumbustical bladder of a book . . . unstoppable as a rush of sack to the kidneys’; Anthony Burgess praised its ‘wordy divagations of a more monkish (Rabelaisian) tradition’ and included it among his 99 best modern novels.

The book is a curiosity: the ‘autobiography’ of a fictionalized dramatic character loosely based on a historical figure. In increasingly puritanical times it may still be found offensive, but this would be to miss the point. Lack of restraint is fundamental to what is, in effect, a 450-page ironic joke, written in the knowledge (and, no doubt, hope) that it would scandalize as much as please. I first read the book forty years ago and I still love it for its boisterous anarchy.

So, who is it that disgusts and delights? He is that ‘trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that huge bombard of sack . . . that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that vanity in years’. It is Falstaff – ‘Jack to my familiars’ – brought to rambunctious life by Robert Nye.

Variously a reporter, milkman, postman and jobbing gardener, Nye was born in London in 1939 to a civil servant and a Welsh farmer’s daughter whose ‘innate peasant story-telling ability’ imbued in him a love of the oral tradition. He was foremost a poet and, for twenty-five years, poetry critic for The Times. But after writing stories for his three young sons, he turned to fiction as a sideline to indulge his fascination with mythology, legend and history

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In 1976, a year remembered in the UK for its blazing summer, publication of a scabrous novel so inflamed a group of academics that they burned copies in the library at Reading University. Less delicate souls embraced the book. It won that year’s Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Guardian Fiction Prize, garnering encomiums from reviewers who struggled to match its exuberant prose. The New York Times called it a ‘fresco of groinwork’; Time Magazine welcomed a ‘swollen, rumbustical bladder of a book . . . unstoppable as a rush of sack to the kidneys’; Anthony Burgess praised its ‘wordy divagations of a more monkish (Rabelaisian) tradition’ and included it among his 99 best modern novels.

The book is a curiosity: the ‘autobiography’ of a fictionalized dramatic character loosely based on a historical figure. In increasingly puritanical times it may still be found offensive, but this would be to miss the point. Lack of restraint is fundamental to what is, in effect, a 450-page ironic joke, written in the knowledge (and, no doubt, hope) that it would scandalize as much as please. I first read the book forty years ago and I still love it for its boisterous anarchy. So, who is it that disgusts and delights? He is that ‘trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that huge bombard of sack . . . that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that vanity in years’. It is Falstaff – ‘Jack to my familiars’ – brought to rambunctious life by Robert Nye. Variously a reporter, milkman, postman and jobbing gardener, Nye was born in London in 1939 to a civil servant and a Welsh farmer’s daughter whose ‘innate peasant story-telling ability’ imbued in him a love of the oral tradition. He was foremost a poet and, for twenty-five years, poetry critic for The Times. But after writing stories for his three young sons, he turned to fiction as a sideline to indulge his fascination with mythology, legend and history. Over a period of thirty years, he produced nine novels on figures from Merlin and Faust to Byron and Joan of Arc’s Marshal, Gilles de Rais. ‘My stories’, he said, ‘have their sources in dreams which more than one person has dreamt, in ballads, jests and yarns, and in those folk tales which are, as it were, the dreams of the people coming to us without the interference of our own identity.’ Falstaff was Nye’s second novel, taking the form of a 100-chapter memoir dictated over 100 days to six secretaries as the braggart knight nears death at his home in Caister Castle, Norfolk, in 1459. Grandiosely entitled the Acta Domini Johannis Fastolfe or Life and Valliant Deeds of Sir John Faustoff or The Hundred Days War, as told by Sir John Fastolf, KG, at face value it is a magnificent riot of bawdy, constructing a life of sufficiently disgraceful excess to befit its swaggering protagonist. Yet it is not all boozing, brawling and bedding. Alert readers will enjoy a stream of sly jokes and camouflaged allusions as well as obscure references to religion, folklore and historical events which may or may not have occurred. Anachronistic nods to authors, philosophers and poets (among them Keats, Joyce, Descartes and Pope) are so seamlessly inserted they can pass unnoticed. Quotes from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor dot the text which, as it is supposedly written 150 years before the Henriad, cheekily implies that Shakespeare plagiarized Falstaff’s words. Intoxicated by his own importance, Falstaff is incapable of sticking to his script and peppers his recollections with bizarre digressions under chapter headings such as ‘About Swinge-Bucklers and Bona-Robas’, ‘About Leprechauns and St Boniface’, ‘About St John Fastolf’s Prick’, ‘About Honour and Onions’ and so forth. Occasionally, he breaks from the narrative to mesh limbs with his willing teenage niece Miranda, down stupefying quantities of sack or verbally abuse his secretaries who dutifully record their humiliation. He is fond of lists: of the different spellings of his name (66), of Miranda’s nicknames for his 14-inch ‘mainspring’ (23), of Popes (34), giants (51) and victuals consumed at a sitting (17 game birds, 22 wines and 4 yards of black pudding). At the end, a three-page inventory of the contents of Caister Castle is followed by a nine-page Last Will and Testament. It also contains crudely drawn illustrations, six showing the different sonic natures of a fart. It is highly eccentric. One secretary, Falstaff’s sceptical stepson Scrope, asks if what he is recording is true and receives the magisterial reply: ‘My belly gives me licence to give imaginative body to what is essentially sparse, even skeletal material: memories, biographies, jokes, histories, letters, images, fragments. I make patterns of my fragments. This book is the pattern I am making.’ He tells us ‘truth is not a goddess or any other manner of immutable or immortal’. We are warned. Vainglorious from the outset, Falstaff claims in the opening sentence that he was conceived under a fig tree growing on the ten-yard erection of the Giant of Cerne Abbas carved on a hillside in Dorset. At 12, he becomes page to the Duke of Norfolk. Addressing the reader as ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’, as if in conversation, he says he spent the next three years dressed as a girl for the pleasure of the Duchess and her maids Portia, Rosalind and Celia (Falstaff’s stepsister is Ophelia, his pet rat Desdemona and his cook, Macbeth), before going to war as squire to the Duke. This is the cue for some preposterously inflated assertions such as triumphing at the Siege of Kildare by pelting Irish besiegers with hogskins of poteen and dispatching French sailors at the Battle of Sluys by breaking their skulls with hogsheads of sack. Scrope suspects his stepfather of inventing whimsy about this battle, for the engagement inconveniently took place in 1340, forty years before Falstaff was born. In contrast to the absurdity of such braggadocio, Nye paints a picture of medieval Merrie England that is wholly credible in its earthy vigour and sheer weirdness. Here is Falstaff arriving in London as a young man, wearing shoes ‘so long and pointed that they needed jewelled chains to hold their toes fastened curled up to my knees’. His codpiece open, and tied at the top with a bunch of ribbons, he walks with minstrels, merchants, mendicants and monks; strolling musicians play rottes, gitterns, citoles and mandores; jokers walk on stilts and jugglers on their hands; London Bridge is piled with tumbledown four-storey houses spanning a noisome tunnel in which a space is kept clear for jousting. Occasionally, Nye’s poesy, which infuses so much of the writing, breaks cover. ‘The rivers flashed. The trees were leaved with light. Windmills wove the wind.’ Nye has tremendous fun tweaking familiar scenes from the Henriad, such as the robbery at Gadshill (Jack proposes three versions of the ‘truth’), carousing at the Boar’s Head (filthy behaviour with Doll Tearsheet) and scrapes with Nym, Bardolph and Pistol (the latter two allowed their own unlikely stories). How did Hotspur really die on the battlefield of Shrewsbury? And what three ill-advised words from Falstaff were the cause of Hal’s later repudiation of his old companion in riot? A mix of pathos and defiance creeps in as the fat knight recalls his ‘mad lad, sweet lag, rascalliest prince’. He protests: ‘In me, by me, through me, he was prepared for the throne of England and France. The Battle of Agincourt was won on the playing fields of Gadshill.’ The use of Wellington’s quote about the Battle of Waterloo is typical: one of the joys of the book is spotting Nye’s plunder of familiar literary phrases. It is a tribute to Nye’s fertile imagination that he devotes only a quarter of the novel to the period of Falstaff’s life with which we are familiar. For this is a book as expansive as Falstaff’s belly and as colourful, ribald and uncontrolled as the medieval world it describes. Elsewhere, we are given vivid descriptions of the plague and the battlefield horrors of Agincourt and Shrewsbury. We read of the death of Henry IV (the ‘Leper King’), the coronation and death of Henry V (‘Harry the Prig’), of May Day, Pope Joan, Bartholomew Fair, of the sieges of Rouen and Harfleur and of the ludicrous Battle of Herrings at Rouvray. Throughout these dubious engagements, Falstaff is ever more Flashman than swordsman. The real Sir John Fastolf, on whom our hero is said to be based, fled the 1429 Battle of Patay through cowardice. Falstaff turns his back on the fighting because, he says, he saw a white roe deer with the face of Joan of Arc. It is a touch of magical realism that encapsulates the strangeness of a world in which superstition still rubbed shoulders with religion, and mystery was allowed its part in life. As the book draws to a close, the unrepentant old goat is losing his sight and cannot read what is being taken down by his amanuenses. Unknown to him, Scrope, outraged at being ordered to record such a litany of disgrace, inserts his own contributions, undermining the entire history. The narrative, he says, is a ‘hellish pack of lies’ written by a devil: ‘He writes a kind of requiem for a life he never lived. I, Scrope, tell you the truth about him and about his book. This is a work of fiction.’ Is it so? The last word goes to Falstaff in a deathbed confession. Nye, who died in 2016, was quietly satisfied with Falstaff, saying, ‘In writing it I found myself, my own voice and pitch.’ This is a gargantuan banquet of a book worthy of Shakespeare’s ‘stuffed cloak bag of guts’. But remember, Falstaff has warned: ‘It is my intention in writing these memorials to set down everything. If that diet of experience proves too rich or strange a meal for some stomachs, then, Eat elsewhere is my advice, and wish you better appetites.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Patrick Welland 2023


About the contributor

Patrick Welland enjoys more leisurely writing after a career in Fleet Street. Like Falstaff, he enjoys drinking in the Boar’s Head – but the Sussex pub is 50 miles from the site of its namesake.

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