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Liontower – a discussion group devoted to the Uncle books.
If you had to draw up a list of the three greatest English comic writers of the twentieth century, Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse would be very obvious choices, but who would be the third man? I think there’s a very good case for his being a columnist on The Daily Telegraph called Peter Simple, who has been writing astonishingly inventive and intelligent fantasies, satires, polemics, and whimsies for more than fifty years and who has been a very important influence on lesser but much more successful and well-known writers like Auberon Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Like Waugh père et fils, he is a reactionary conservative, but unlike either he never writes anything obscene and rarely writes anything malicious: he is a gentle writer who recognizes that we are all ridiculous, but that some of us are simply more ridiculous than others.
As Kingsley Amis writes in the introduction to The Stretchford Chronicles (1980), an early collection of Simple’s writing, “just to mention” any of his “recurring institutions or characters will set the initiated grinning”. And many of them, created as satire as long ago as the 1950s, seem to have called real people into being: the “avant-garde self-publicist” Neville Dreadberg2; the immensely rich and self-confident Hampstead socialist Mrs Dutt-Pauker3 and her precociously bearded activist grandson, Bert Brecht Mao Che Odinga; the neglected, toad-keeping, lead-mine-dwelling man-of-letters Julian Birdbath; the trend-setting-and-seeking Bishop of Bevindon, Dr Spaceley-Trellis4; the Earl of Mountwarlock’s gifted major-domo Phantomsby, “one of the few practising werewolves left in the Midlands”; the silver-tongued war hero and public servant Gen. Sir Frederick Nidgett; and the leader of the militant Motorists’ Liberation Front, J. Bonington Jagworth, born in a long-ago court appearance:
Read moreNEWS FROM THE COURTS
James Bonnington Jagworth, 42, described as a motorist, of Staines, was accused at Nerdley (Staffs) Magistrates’ Court yesterday of driving without due care and attention.
Sgt. E. Harmer, of Stretchford City Police, said he saw Mr. Jagworth pass three other cars on a blind corner leading to a narrow railway bridge in a built-up area of Soup Hales at over 70 mph. After an 80 mile chase he caught up with him near the Welsh border.
Accused of exceeding the speed limit, Mr. Jagworth said: “You say I was doing 70 mph. Rubbish, I was doing 95. What’s more, in my new Boggs Yobbo convertible I can do over 130.”
When arrested, Mr. Jagworth took a truculent attitude, and said repeatedly, “Do you know who I am? You’ll hear more of this.”
Mr. Jagworth, who conducted his own defence, stated in court: “I am appearing here as the representative of the whole persecuted body of British motorists. What sort of car do you drive anyhow?” he asked the chairman, Dr. Ellis Goth-Jones.
When Dr. Goth-Jones admitted shamefacedly that he owned a 6-year-old Snail Popular Saloon, but seldom drove it as he found the roads too dangerous, there were titters, and some booing, from the gallery. After receiving an apology from the Bench for the waste of his time, Mr. Jagworth left the court to resume his interrupted journey. (1961)5
Review of Peter Simple’s two volumes of autobiography
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If, like me, you’ve often tried and failed to see the full charms of Lord Dunsany’s writing, The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) might stop you being puzzled by the praise heaped on him by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft: this book is very simply written but very rich and flavorful, like Cadcoon’s groceries in Uncle Cleans Up. It tells the story of a Spanish nobleman’s son, Ramón Alonzo, and his apprenticeship to a magician whose fees are slight but life-destroying: he asks for nothing but his clients’ shadows. Dunsany works out the implications of this with enormous imagination and skill as he tells the dream-like story of Ramón Alonzo’s attempts to win back both his own shadow and the shadow of the magician’s charwoman. Quiet, quirky, and compassionate, and quite different from Dunsany’s enormously influential but, to modern readers, sometimes twee stories of fantasy and thievery:
[The magician] led, and the young man followed. And again he was amongst beams of age-darkened oak, and twisty corridors leading into the gloom, which the shape of the magician before him rendered unnaturally blacker. They came to a black door studded with wooden knobs, upon which the magician rapped, and the door opened. They entered, and Ramón Alonzo perceived at once that it was a magician’s work-room, not only by the ordinary appliances or instruments of magic, but also by the several sheets of gloom that seemed to come down from the roof through the midst of the air, across the natural dimness of the room. The appliances of magic were there in abundance; stuffed crocodiles lying as thick as on lonely mud-banks in Africa, dried herbs resembling plants that blossom in wonted fields, yet wearing a look that was never on any flowers of ours, great twinkling jewels out of the heads of toads, huge folios written by masters that had followed the Art in China, small parchments with spells upon them in Persian, Indian, or Arabic, the horn of a unicorn that had slain its master; rare spices, condiments, and the philosopher’s stone. (The Charwoman’s Shadow, Chapter 4, “Ramón Alonzo Learns a Mystery Known to the Reader”)
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1. The pen-name of Michael Wharton.
2. Dreadberg was Will Self au pied de la lettre nearly before Will Self was born.
3. Mrs Dutt-Pauker is uncannily like a New Labour children’s minister called Margaret Hodge, whose nickname in local government was “Enver” (from the dictator of communist Albania Enver Hoxha (1908-1985), whose surname was pronounced “Hojja”).
4. The current Bishop of Oxford is one of several candidates for Dr Spaceley-Trellis’s Doppelgänger.
5. From The Stretchford Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple, The Daily Telegraph, Purnell & Sons, Bristol, 1980, pg. 55.