Expostulatory Epistle of a Coot to a Self-Styled Whale and a Soi-Disant Elephant

When Frankenstein’s Monster turns into a Whale,

Belabouring typewriters with his blunt tail,

In order to settle accounts with a male

Of a totally different species, words fail

To express the alarm, that drains blood from the pale

Hollow cheeks of the sensitive Coot.

When Possum responds to the challenge, and can’t

Refrain from transforming his shape, elegant

Hitherto, into that of a Tom Elephant,1

And a tusker at that, the biggest extant,

Imagine the terror that this must implant

In the shivering soul of the Coot.

The Coot may be bald, and the Coot may be blind,

But never forget that the Coot has a mind,

Of which you may say that, while lagging behind

The brains of the mightier mammals, you’ll find

None so open and candid, so mild and so kind

As that of the quiet-loving Coot.

You may say of the Coot, moreover, that he

Is renowned among birds for his wide charity,

Extending so far that he can’t bear to see

Even brutish dictators at loggerheads. e.

g. as Whale and as Elephant now seem to be,

Jeopardising the peace of the Coot.

At night, he will wake with a low muffled scream,

Provoked by the sight, in a blood-curdling dream,

Of a small pond in Surrey, not fed by a stream,2

Jammed with Whales, large and small, all blowing off steam,

No room left at all for rudd, carp, or bream,

And no further sleep for the Coot.

And if, with the aid of narcotics, he seek

The solace of Morpheus, a ghastlier shriek

Will escape from the parched orifice of his beak,

At a vision of Kensington,3 crowded but meek,

Trampled down by an Elephant, trumpeting Greek—

Oh, mercy upon a poor Coot!

There once was a Palace of Peace at the Hague,4

Whose outlines have somehow become very vague.

There’s a Palace of Sorts at Geneva, where nations

Assemble for inter-hallucinations.5

There’s Alexandra Palace too,6 and a Palace in the East End,7

And a House in the Euston Road, where Friend meets Friend8

(Though what a Friend would say, if a Friend were a Whale,

Remains a quite unimaginable tale).

There is, also, a room somewhere in the South West region of London,

denominated a Vestry,

Where pious Jekyll purloins letter-paper,

That Hyde may cut a rogue Elephant’s caper,9

Trusting to an ecclesiastical alibi, till

Chief Inspector French ensures crime’s requital.10

Where, Coot may ask, has the gospel business got to?

Yet peace and goodwill remain our Coot’s motto.11

To Elephants and to Whales, then, the appeal of Coot is:

Resume your proper shapes12 and your former duties.

[Geoffrey Faber]

Notes
  1. 1.

    JDH note: ‘Thomas being the first name of the celebrated Mr. E.’

  2. 2.

    JDH note: ‘Mr M[orley]’s former residence at Lingfield in Surrey.’

    See TSE to Emily Hale, 21 Apr. 1934: ‘Frank is so passionately interested in his labours on his estate [at Pike’s Farm] that he wants to be at it all the weekend – he is the sort who need a good deal of physical exercise – and in consequence his guests (male guests I mean) find themselves engaged in the same operations. On Saturday afternoon I found myself whitewashing the interior of a chicken-coop, while [Geoffrey] Tandy acted as bricklayer’s mate, preparing mortar for an entrance-gate that Frank is building, and a brick wall against which he proposes to grow fruit trees. On Sunday afternoon I mowed the lawn, and on both days pumped the gas, while Tandy was engaged in operations on a new punt which they have bought for the pond. This is all very pleasant; the only out is that Frank does not need so much sleep as I and some other people seem to, and we get to bed rather late.’

  3. 3.

    JDH note: ‘Mr E. then resided in South Kensington.’

  4. 4.

    Opened on 28 Aug. 1913, the Peace Palace in The Hague, The Netherlands, was built to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration created by the Hague Convention of 1899 with the aim of ending war and upholding international law. (It now houses the International Court of Justice, the judicial body of the United Nations.)

  5. 5.

    The Palais des Nations, an art deco structure overlooking Lake Geneva, was built in the 1930s to house the League of Nations, which began its business on 10 Jan. 1920 following the Treaty of Versailles.

  6. 6.

    Alexandra Palace, a graceful glass-enclosed building in Muswell Hill, north London – now Grade II-listed – was built as a centre for recreation, education and entertainment. Opened in 1873, it was a ‘People’s Palace’ – a counterpart to the Crystal Palace in south London – and is still popularly known as ‘Ally Pally’. In 1936, part of the structure was leased by the trustees for the production of the BBC’s first TV service.

  7. 7.

    The People’s Palace, on the Mile End Road, East London, was opened by Queen Victoria in 1887. It was financed by the Unitarian philanthropist Walter Besant, along with the Beaumont Trust and other benefactors. Incorporating a large concert hall called the Queen’s Hall, a library, Winter Garden, swimming pool, gymnasium and gardens, it was designed to meet the urgent cultural needs – theatre, cinema, music hall – of the deprived East End of London. However, the main concert hall was laid waste by a fire on 26 February 1931. But the People’s Palace was rebuilt, fashioned of Portland stone and red brick in art deco style, and featuring reliefs by Eric Gill, and it was reopened in 1937 by King George VI and Queen Mary. In 1954 it was purchased by Queen Mary College, and is now central to Queen Mary University of London.

  8. 8.

    Friends House, at 173 Euston Road, London – a finely-proportioned neo-Georgian multi-purpose building constructed of Portland stone and brick (it includes a large meeting house, smaller halls, library and offices) – was designed by the Quaker architect Hubert Lidbetter and opened in 1927; it is the home of the British Quakers.

  9. 9.

    In Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1886), the good Henry Jekyll transmogrifies himself by means of chemical experimentation into the evil, and ultimately murderous, Edward Hyde. In Ch. 8, Jekyll’s staunch friend, the lawyer Utterson, is appalled to find among Jekyll’s effects ‘a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies’. (Any editor might sympathise now and then.)

    Geoffrey Faber’s mischievous insinuation is that the ‘pious’ Eliot steals writing paper from the vestry at St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road – where he had served since 1934 as the vicar’s warden – so as to ‘cut a caper’ (perhaps not unlike the gull Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night) in his persona as the rogue ‘Elephant’.

  10. 10.

    Chief Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard was the hero of the great popular series of detective novels written by the engineer Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957).

  11. 11.

    Luke 2: 14: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’

    See the Archbishop’s Sermon in Murder in the Cathedral:

    ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.’ The fourteenth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke.’

    Robert W. Ayers , ‘Murder in the Cathedral: A “Liturgy Less Divine”’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 20: 4 (Winter 1978), 579–98: ‘The text for the sermon, Luke 2: 14, is the gospel for the first Mass at midnight on Christmas Day, and … Thomas’s discussion of that text is drawn in terms of Hebrews 5: 1–6, which was to become the text of the epistle for the feast of St Thomas, Bishop and Martyr (29 December).’ W. H. Shewring in Blackfriars 14: 186 (Sept. 1935), 709–10: ‘One is surprised to see the Archbishop’s Christmas sermon lose something of its relevance by the use of the text of the translation “Peace, good will toward men” instead of the traditional and historic “Peace to men of good will”.’

    See too John Guy, Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim: A 900-Year-Old Story Retold (London: Viking, 2012), 306–7: ‘His text was the passage which in the Latin Vulgate Bible reads: “Peace on earth towards men of goodwill.” Far from being a promise of universal concord, as is suggested by the later translation in the King James Version, Becket interpreted the text to mean that peace would be limited to men of goodwill, allowing retribution to be unleashed against those like the de Brocs and their henchmen who continued to disobey God and the Church.’

  12. 12.

    Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, sc. VI: ‘Faustus, we are come from hell to show thee some pastime: sit down, and thou shalt see all the Seven Deadly Sins appear in their proper shapes.’