Freudful Myth-Information

The 1920s, wrote Rose Macaulay in Life among the English (1942), her potted history of English social life, was a decade of booms: ‘There were booms in photography, Sunday film and theatre clubs, surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry, Proust, James Joyce, dancing, rink skating, large paintings on walls of rooms.’

There was also a boom in humour: the Jeeves novels of P. G. Wodehouse, the plays of Noël Coward, the Beachcomber columns of J. B. Morton – and then, at the start of the next decade, 1066 and All That (1930), the incomparable comic history book by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman (see Slightly Foxed, No. 16). After this debut, there was a boom in Sellar and Yeatman. In 1934, 1066 and All That was made into a popular musical, and by 1936, a fellow humorist, Eric Partridge, could note that ‘Sellar and Yeatman’ had already become shorthand for their most famous work. That fame continues today. But their other major contribution to public education at the time – And Now All This (1932) – has been largely forgotten. The Times reported this ‘equally amusing sequel’ to be one of the ‘Successes of the Season’, bringing the total number of Sellar-and- Yeatmans sold to 100,000 in two years. The ‘Authors’ Impressions’ on the copyright page chart the agonies of writing a follow-up: ‘January 1932: A Good Thing/August 1932: A Bad Thing/October 1932: Anything You Say’. (The title page of 1066 and All That, you may remember, promises ‘103 Good Things’ and ‘5 Bad Kings’.) But according to his obituary in 1968, And Now All This was Yeatman’s favourite of their collaborations. It is not hard to see why – I sometimes wonder if it isn’t mine too. Sellar and Yeatman’s last two books, still very funny but largely written separately, each focused on a favourite pastime: Horse Nonsense (1934) for the sociable Yeatman and Garden Rubbish (1936) for the more retiring Sellar. But they were at their sharpest in partnership, when Sellar’s schoolmasterly levity saddled up on Yeatman’s satirical urbanity – a horse that gets full rein here. When I first enthused about the pair in Slightly Foxed, I suggested that the ‘histerical’ wordplay of 1066 and All That bears comparison with the playful treatment of history in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. With And Now All This, the comic Modernism of Sellar and Yeatman comes into full bloom. Subtitled ‘Vol. i of the Hole Pocket Treasury of Absolutely General Knowledge’, it surveys a wide range of modern obsessions, from knitting (‘Woolology’) to Arctic exploration (‘Polar Bearings’). It is their tendency to surreal confusion that Sellar and Yeatman develop in And Now All This. The most memorable images of 1066 and All That – like those of Finnegans Wake – arise from what might be called the ‘punconscious’: that happy region of the mind somewhere between wit and accident (‘Alfred the Cake’, 1066; ‘William the Conk’, Finnegans Wake). So it is not surprising that, like Joyce, the two Englishmen should have pursued their methods to the author of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious: Sigmund Freud. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce spoke of making a ‘freudful mistake’ – the kind of revealing malapropism that we know as a ‘Freudian slip’. Sellar and Yeatman slip the same mistake into And Now All This. The chapter on ‘Psycho-Babycraft’ informs us that the Freudian theorist ‘Fuggmeister’ has declared ‘Everything is Wrong with Somebody’, and that, sooner or later, ‘you will have to answer the utterly Freudful question – “Is it Me?”’ Like the indignant sympathy for history’s underdogs that flashes out in 1066 and All That (‘For Pheasant read Peasant’), Sellar and Yeatman’s ‘Guide to Mental Hygiene for Modern Babies Between the Ages of 0 and 3’ savages the patronizing tone of such genuine selfhelp books as Psychoanalysis for Normal People. ‘The main object of Modern Psychology’, they observe, ‘is to catch people out’:

To surprise persons (or even parsons) secretly adoring their boot-trees, suppressing their terrors, pressing their trousers, or even worse . . .

The only (psycho-)logical solution, they conclude, is to catch everyone young. Just as 1066 and All That took in its sights the sentimental inanities of Victorian children’s history books, so here a bead is drawn on the covert Victorianism of the Freudian nursery expert. In ‘Psycho-Babycraft’, the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of infant sexuality that Freud wrote about in a spirit of understanding becomes a stick with which to beat anxiously tender parents. According to ‘Foggmeister’, Freud is wrong to claim that all babies are ‘permorphous polyverts’. It is only babies who are ‘handled too much or in any way unduly fondled in early childhood’ who fail to develop into normal ‘non-polyversive monomorphs’. And this, the authors comment, ‘ought to comfort you, even if your mother can’t’. Similarly, grown-ups who are not having ‘psymbolical dreams’ about ‘The Unfrustrated Intention to Eat the Grandfather (Bravo!)’ are ‘dreaming them wrong’. The potential dangers are illustrated by the tale of a china merchant who woke up in the middle of dreaming ‘that there was a Bull in his shop’, only to discover on going downstairs ‘that it was a Cow’. The traumatic misunderstanding left him ‘abnormally Bull-conscious’, and was only cured by ‘A course of well-thought-out gestures of compensation such as attiring himself in the uniform of a Beef-Eater, and making bull’s-eyes at all his customers.’ The punning logic of the Freudian dream analysis is inverted by this perverse case study. A man awakes too soon from a promisingly symbolic dream based on a common phrase – ‘a bull in a china shop’ – only to pay for the prosaic literalism of his response with a nightmare of fancy dress and facial tics. As in 1066 and All That, what carries the best jokes of And Now All This into something like poetry is an excess of wit. When the ‘Absolutely General Editors’ speak of sleepers entering ‘the land of Polymorpheus’, they casually combine their reading of Freud with their classical education. Elsewhere, ancient literature gets a whole chapter of learned mockery. ‘Myth-Information’ sets out to show – like many more pessimistic Modernist works – that ‘Western Culture is fundamentally myth-guided’. Proof comes in the form of the ‘Arthurian Cycle’, which looks like a Penny Farthing designed by William Morris, and is ‘steered by faith (or witchcraft)’. The illustrations, again provided by 1066 and All That’s John Reynolds, are another running joke. In ‘Myth-Information’ the same armless and legless statue of a naked man is said to be ‘Odysseus bidding farewell to the Hydro’ from the front, and ‘Umslopogas defying the Erymanthean Boer’ from behind. In ‘Geography’, an all-purpose sketch of a classical ruin is reprinted as both ‘The Royal Exchange Liverpool: Birthplace of Charlotte Brontë’, and then, upside down, as ‘Stalactites’. In the final chapter, on the curious topic of ‘Golliwology’, ‘Fig i’, ‘Fig ii’ and ‘Fig iii’ are just that: pictures of an expanding group of figs. It is tempting – to Professors of Golliwology, at least – to read the circular absurdities of a chapter in which ‘the point continually eludes you’ as an early instance of Postmodernism and All That. In so far as its comic monologue has a subject, it is the mid-twentieth century outstripping of traditional ‘general knowledge’ by the mysteries of modern science:

Take the Universe. No, you take it. Have you got it? All right – Space is curved but finite, and, as Einstein warned the world, if you go on you’ll only bump into the back of your own head. Therefore – Take an infinite number of Scientists and bang them to atoms. As the sparks fly upward, see fig ii.

But Sellar and Yeatman give us their own steer on their place in literary history with a ‘Mystery P.S.’ This addresses the fact that the authorship of 1066 And All That was initially attributed to the betterknown Punch writer, A. P. Herbert. To refute everyone ‘with a keen sense of Rumour’, they offer the story of what Edward Lear did when he overheard two ladies in a railway carriage discussing the theory that his Nonsense Books were really written by ‘Edward, Earl of Derby’: ‘he proved that he was more than a mere anagram by doffing his hat and showing his name on the lining’. Literal-minded to the last, the authors offer a picture of ‘our own unanswerable Hat, in facsimile, in the hope that you will find it utterly memorable and convincing’. For Freud, a hat, ‘with its raised middle piece and the two downward-hanging side pieces’, symbolized – you guessed it. But to my mind Sellar and Yeatman’s memorable hat has a more innocent meaning. In a lecture that he gave on Nonsense literature, Sellar spoke with the highest admiration of Lear’s ‘fearless imbecility’. The concluding symbol of And Now All This – which floats over the motto ‘Copyright if you can’ – is Edward Lear’s modest poetic crown, sported by the authors of a modern Nonsense Book.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Jeremy Noel-Tod 2008