A Shelf of Imaginary Books

 

    My home having limited space, I have found it convenient to house a portion of my library within my mind.  The shelves there of imaginary books never need dusting, and their contents are besides all mine, as opposed to the clunky palpable volumes I must share with their authors, and even, in a way, with previous readers.  This single parentage leaves the unreal titles with a certain simplicity, but it lends them as well a kind of lightness due to their airy conception.  Should these titles evanesce tomorrow, they are easily replaceable by a functioning fancy, in which case yours will do as well as mine. 

     Though secondary sources for many of these authors are elusive, the reader might always find a good account in the literary history of St. John Landers-Hoopes (who never objected to the public addressing him by his school nickname “Skoochy”).  His compendious if dated survey The Long Landscape of Literature treats every author here mentioned, and a select few are discussed in the more familiar and impressionistic essays of his Languors in the Library.

     On the shelf’s left side, claiming chronological precedence, is a collection of Old English poetry, including the “Song of the Swab” (“in scudding storms I swept the decks”) and the devotional “Mariner Christ” (“o steer, my son, by highest star”) as well as a fragment of The Battle of Buldkippen (“then came skirmish and slash, spar and set-to”).  Awash in sibilant alliteration, the browser will turn with relief to gossipy revelations of Beowulf’s character flaws in “Unferths Giedd.”

     The Middle English section includes the rollicking mystery plays treating The Likerish King Solomon and Noah Atþe Tauerne once performed as part of the observance of Corpus Christi by the people of Pucklechurch in South Gloucestershire.  Of interest to students of intellectual history is Gregory Grosseteste’s De philosophia mundi and his Tractatus Concerning the Revision of Ptolemy’s Geography based on Arabic sources and bound with his equally erroneous works on optics, algebra, and bee-keeping. 

     Next is a fat volume from the towering figure of the later medieval period Laurence Lemman including his Bouquet of Lovers’ Laments, recounting Biblical and Classical tales, replete with pathos and love-longing, and the dream allegory The Battle Between the Scorpions and the Nightingales which allegorically represents factions in the court of Richard II, the movements of the planets in the night sky, and a soap opera-like love triangle.  On a lighter theme Lemman also retold fabliaux such as the “Tale of Priscilla’s Handy-Man” and “Thieving Tom Scores Again.”      

     A charming if more obscure work possesses the space next to Lemman’s fat volume: the graceful tail-rhyme romance of “The Knight of the Dolorous Tooth.”  Likewise anonymous and inspired by similarly unmerited suffering, The Narrative of the Life of St Swithun details the bishop’s mortification by providential bunions while making his diocesan rounds.  Not included in the saint’s hagiography are two songs discovered in the faintest notation In the margin of his copy of St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: “Herkne to mine wonges wan” and “Bryng vs in an ocean of ale,” the latter sung yet today at the High Table of Oxford.

     The shelf’s Elizabethan section incudes Devereux Cholmondeley’s sonnet sequence Frumentum and Solitia, the delightful Latin lyric “Thōmâs, Thōmâs, filius tibicine,” and a selection of his drama containing the comic Never Too Much, a tragedy relating The Lamentable Reign of King Ooboo, and the unclassifiable Seasonable as Snow in Summer.  (Regrettably, none of these plays has ever been brought to the stage, and the only historical records of their author concern his numerous prosecutions for debt and disorderly conduct.)

     There follows a slim but complete book of the poems of the seventeenth century Cavalier Sir John Cribbage, known for such delicate and melodious lyrics as “Snipping the Tulips of Youth,” “A Meeting with the Milkmaid of Devon,” and “The Rose that is Most Ravishing.”  His more spiritual poems include “Sunk in a Cesspool of Sin” and one written in a more passionately mystical moment, “Licking the Wounds of my Lord” of which Buxtehude made a moving chorale.

     There follows a volume of essays by Denis Mowbray first published in the periodical Chit-Chat under the name Scriptor Stultus.  The author, descended from six generations of younger sons and finding himself on Grub Street, wrote such familiar favorites as “The Cavalier Who Could Not Ride,” “Boiled Beef and Grey Peas,” and “A Late Stroll on Pall Mall.”  These appear in an edition along with a selection of pieces by his colleague Timothy Toff using the name Jackanapes, including “Dozing on Chevy Chase,” “Advice Better Given Than Taken,” and “The Most Picturesque Beggar in Covent Garden.”

     With the arrival of neo-Classicism and the reign of heroic couplets came Jonas Dryasdust, writer of the literary satire Doctor Asinus and his Disciples, the philosophical musings of The Nature of Things, as well as such brief occasional pieces as “Mrs. Lovejoy’s Nosegay” and “On Tossing a Bone to Flora’s Fido.”  His essay “On the Poet’s Profession” stresses his concern with craft: “just as a fool may be shown to advantage, with sufficient polish even the dullest of sententiae can be brought to sparkle anew.”  

     Oliver Wickham, “the melodious finch of Staffordshire,” was an early suicide, but first composed a revealing allegory, The Palace of Indulgence, the topographical survey “The Potteries,” and short pieces such as “A Lofty View of Stoke-on-Trent” and “An Ode on Desuetude.”

    Toward the eighteenth century’s end came the chilling mysteries of Mrs. Cudworthy’s Lost in Italian Mists and The Jesuitical Pirate, as well as several anonymous novels from the Athena Press: The Convent Ruins and Cries from the Old Castle.

     The Collected Poetry of Miles Warnham marks a turn in poetic taste.  Warnham is remembered for such favorites as his “Expostulation to a Clod,” “A Distant View of Lincoln Minster,” and “On Peckishness.”  He boldly announced his dissent from the prevailing style with the influential preface “The Harp with Fancy Freed,” which advocated “uplifting the mundane with a steam-engine’s afflatus.”  Later, in less energetic terms, Warnham described the process as “tossing upon my subject a water-color wash of tastefully dilute genius.”

     For much of the nineteenth century, the influential poet laureate Lord Timothy Wiggins enjoyed a popularity (now long vanished) based on early lyrics that appeared in Posies, an Annual such as “Robin Hood’s Gambit” and “The Nasturtiums Speak.”  His metrical retelling of the life of Henry VIII, The Giant of England’s Destiny, which suppresses all but the first of the monarch’s marriages, has likewise aged poorly.  His poems celebrating the queen and her relatives and their many birthdays have yet to inspire even a dissertation.    

     Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, one finds the works of the notorious Geoffrey Greville, better known by his nom de plume Sylvester Sybaris, including the scandalous novels Ganymede in Soho and Lost in Lethe as well as his little chapbook, a pamphlet really, Lavender Lyrics, the composition of which exhausted the author so that he was obliged to spend the year 1897 receiving visitors from a bed trimmed in peacock feathers.

     The collector of imaginary books has little taste for the present, so the last book, were it real, would have been published slightly over a hundred years ago: T. L. Cosgrove’s dark Modernist epic, The Cursed City (“the dark, dank nectar of the gutter/ has dripped upon my spats”).

     Perhaps one day one of the works from this shelf will be committed to paper, but not by me.  These days, it is all I can do of a summer afternoon to recline on my sofa, having selected a volume from the conceptual shelf for review.  My book will have the advantage of weightlessness, which facilitates reading supine and, when I do not fall into a doze, I find myself lifted into the aether by the author’s precious turns of phrase and profound insights.  I almost hear the snorts of Pegasus sounding rather hexametric.  Like dreams, however, these impressions are composed of gossamer and are all but instantly blown away by the breeze of time.  The remainder of one’s memories, knowledge, and taste, of course, last only a short while longer, but we each have a turn at playing the part of homo ludens and we can rejoice that among our toys are marvelous words and curious books, almost aglow, prickly with palpable meaning.