Introduction

‘Oh yes, one wants to keep one’s hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. One doesn’t want to lose one’s skill.’

T. S. Eliot, interviewed in 1958 by Donald Hall, in Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions (New York, 1978), 211

‘The idea of a commercial edition of Noctes Binanianae has already occurred to us and we plan to publish it in due course …’

Matthew Evans (Managing Director, Faber & Faber) to John Haffenden, 12 Oct. 1983

‘I shall be publishing an ordinary edition of Noctes Binanianae …’

Valerie Eliot to Canon Donald Nicholson, 19 Jan. 1989

‘[T]he little book that [Delmore Schwartz] saw in the library – which is now, with other items in the Houghton Library at Harvard – was not a book of parodies at all, though some of the poems were written in the manners of various elder bards. It was a collection of poems by several hands, Frank Morley, Geoffrey Faber, John Hayward and myself, in which we exercised our gifts of reciprocal insult in humorous verse. Only a few copies were printed. I gave one to my brother, who left it to the Eliot Collection, and in that way it met the eyes of Delmore Schwartz. I am glad he thinks that the book is masterly, although he was unaware that there were four masters and not one … I do think our efforts were pretty good, and I was particularly pleased with one of my own effusions written in almost faultless French and another written in rather bad German.’

T. S. Eliot to Dwight Macdonald (New Yorker), 25 Mar. 1959

Noctes Binanianae (1939) – ‘Bina Nights’ – comprises the proceedings, and the proceeds, of a poetry symposium held over a period of several months between 1936 and 1939 by T. S. Eliot and three of his dearest friends – specifically his publishing colleagues Geoffrey Faber and Frank Vigor Morley, and their younger associate, the editor, critic and bibliographer John Hayward. Since Hayward was confined by illness to a wheelchair – he could not even leave his apartment and get onto the street without one or more assistants to manhandle his wheelchair – the friends would spontaneously gather from time to time for a drinking and poetry party at Hayward’s large rented room not far from Gloucester Road in South Kensington. Eliot spoke appreciatively of such gatherings with his coterie as ‘the Kensington Kulture Club’.¹

To date, Eliot’s contributions to the unitary volume of nonsense verses have been extracted, with reports of the other contributions, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (2 vols, Faber & Faber, 2015).² The present edition provides an opportunity for readers to enjoy the complete concatenation as it was intended: in full and in sequence. Eliot himself knew that Noctes Binanianae was a collaborative work, not to be dissevered: he scarcely thought to print his own verses separately from the group production.³ The full text of Noctes Binanianae – this interanimated series of light verses, centos and pastiches – provides a grand opportunity for his readers, including devotees of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and the world-wide audience for the musical Cats, to appreciate to a fuller extent his comic genius – his kindliness, his playfulness, his mischievousness – with his bantering verses put back into their full context, their original occasion, alongside the provocative rejoinders of the other players. Much recent literary-critical labour has gone towards assessing Eliot as mimic, parodist, pasticheur and dandy – his sources, his indebtedness, his creative transformations – but few readers have been able to estimate the true scale of his achievements in light verse. Accordingly, one major purpose of this edition of Noctes Binanianae is to show off more of his humour, his collaborative inventiveness and his grace in knocking out chaffing verses with his friends.

John Hayward, who was one of Eliot’s longest-standing friends, aptly described him as:

a satirical wit … a connoisseur of the ridiculous, an ironical commentator on human folly, a lover of allusive quotation (particularly from the dicta of Sherlock Holmes and other eminent detectives), and a passionate observer of what may be called the Bouvard et Pécuchet way of life.

(Hayward, the ‘only begetter’ of Bustopher Jones and Skimbleshanks, was the ‘Man in White Spats’ to whom Eliot gave thanks in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.⁴)

Few commentators on Eliot, whether critics or biographers, have reckoned with the scope of his hilarious ability to ‘do the police in different voices’: the perfect pitch of his ear for mimicry. It is what makes him such a brilliant parodist and pasticheur, such a great writer of nonsense-verse, and what (most especially) animates the flytings of Noctes Binanianae. Critics who discuss Eliot’s ‘wit’ in solemn tones tend to miss the versatility and deliciousness of his humour. For example: while everyone knows that the nickname ‘Possum’ is taken from Uncle Remus, few of Eliot’s readers have been able to appreciate the fact that he was so steeped in the artificial dialect of Uncle Remus that he could impersonate it to a T. Eliot told Janet Adam Smith: ‘I have found that Uncle Remus needs to be modified a good deal to be intelligible; and that’s difficult to keep up, because as I warm to the theme I tend to lapse completely into my native patois. The result, in one lamentable instance in Clackmannan, was a flood of tears, and some embarrassment to the reader.’⁵ He was not exaggerating, as this sustained riff illustrates:

Dear Pollytandym’m,

Well Mis’ Tandy yo’ oughta know they aint no need for to beat roun’ de bush wit ole Possum. Bless yo’ hea’t, ma’am, they aint no diffunce ’twixt now an’ nex’ June so fur as that go, ’cept what ole Possum is now live ’n kickin’ ’n mebbe by June he may be co’pse. Le’s deal wit’ situatiums as they ’rise, and mebbe by summertime we review needs and fun’s. Aint got no time fo’ to ’spatiate, kase gotta put on Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clo’s termorrer fo’ to go to de Big House; but I certainly have ’preciated yo’ familious news and would likewise ’preciate dat li’l chicken, but would much mo’ ef yo’ brung it up yo’self by han’, or mebbe a l’il shoat er some simmons er passel er sparrowgrass, en ef yo’ come have a seegyar wit’ me and Mis’ Meadows an’ de gals. Well now Mis’ Tandy I mus’ en’ dis ’pistle en’ hopin’ yo’ co’porosity sagasnate same as old Possum’s,

TP⁶

Eliot simply loved playing the clown, and was far more spontaneously high-spirited than some of his more po-faced commentators have suggested. As the Irish librarian William Lefanu attested, ‘Eliot I met several times with John [Hayward] and elsewhere, though I never knew him well; I disagreed with most of his opinions, but couldn’t but enjoy his charm and mischievous teasing – he was so much nicer than his austere public image.’⁷ Equally notable is the fact that Eliot really could take a joke: he enjoyed being teased and bantered. One of his close friends, the German translator Nora Wydenbruck, recorded in 1949: ‘Eliot’s ready sense of humour and his sensitive tact make him a brilliant conversationalist on every theme … Eliot loves to tell stories against himself and enjoys incidents which would be gall and wormwood to a vain man.’⁸ So too, Ian Bevan, in a published profile of the poet dating from 1950: ‘The ability to laugh at himself is not the least of Eliot’s virtues.’⁹

In January 1937, at a time when exchanges of the Noctes Binanianae verses were already in hand, Rose Macaulay and Maurice L. Richardson proposed to compile an entertaining collection of what they called ‘Modern Vulgar Errors or pseudodoxica’ – ‘the mind of the modern public teems with fallacies of a more sociological nature, any one of which could be made the subject of an amusing short light essay’, they noted – and they invited Eliot to contribute a brief essay (up to 3,000 words) on a fallacy of his own choosing. They were approaching some thirty prominent writers, ranging from Clive Bell and Isaiah Berlin to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, they told him. The volume would make up ‘quite a revealing commentary on our peculiarly distressing times’.

In the event, Eliot declined the tempting invitation. Nonetheless, he continued to be stimulated by Macaulay and Richardson’s prospectus of ‘modern vulgar errors’. He wrote on 2 August 1938, for Hayward’s benefit:

I have added one more to my growing collection of

Pseudodoxia Contemporanea

i.e.

All Policeman have big feet.

(Janes¹⁰ turns out to have smaller feet than I have.)

The previous items in the collection are

A fart, strained through bath water, loses both odour and inflammability.

A cigarette, smoked before breakfast, is sovereign against costiveness.

(With which may be compared the superstition recorded by Ben Jonson:

To rub the fingers between the toes, and sniff them, is sovereign against costiveness.

The number of pseudodoxia turning on the matter of costiveness must be legion.

Other specimens welcomed.

On 3 August 1938:

Pseudodoxia Contemporanea.

That cigar ash, stirred into black coffee, is most urgently aphrodisiac.

P.S. It is further argued, that the better the cigar (irrespective, it seems of the kind

or quality of the coffee) the more powerful its aphrodisiac action.

I cannot find any respectable authority for this further pseudodoxy.

The number of aphrodisiac pseudodoxia must be legion.

Similarly, in 1946, soon after Eliot and Hayward took up residence together in a flat, 19 Carlyle Mansions, on Cheyne Walk, London, Hayward reported this incident to a friend as entirely typical of his spontaneously jovial flatmate: ‘Yesterday I succeeded at last in buying Tom a chamber-pot which he duly placed on his head (for the first & last time) in the extasy of acquiring it. It was rather small for the noble knob, but will be adequate for its proper purpose.’ It was just as typical of Eliot’s impishness that when he spotted a newspaper article mentioning the proper names ‘Firo and Farts’ he suggested to Hayward that he should organize a New Statesman competition to find the most succinct Who’s Who entries for the persons who rejoiced in such names. Likewise, in December 1937 – at a time when he was engaged in devising the poems of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – his eye seized with delight upon an item in the Evening Standard, as he reported to another friend:

Have you seen that remarkable Piece in the Standard about Mr. Woodiwiss the bull-dog breeder? Well it seems Mr. Woodiwiss went to some dog show some years ago and he noticed a ‘smell of cats’; so he went upstairs and there was a cat show in progress, and his attention was caught by a short-haired tabby named Champion Xenophon. ‘Within a few minutes he was mine.’ And that’s how Mr. Woodiwiss began to breed cats. You do get your 1d worth out of the Evening Standard, and no mistake, every time. So will close, and thanking you for your hospitality, which was much appreciated & enjoyed, TP¹¹

Geoffrey Faber first met Eliot in December 1924, when Eliot was thirty-seven: they hit it off instantly. Faber resolved to make full use of his new friend’s aptitude, know-how (including his years of experience of working for Lloyds Bank in the City of London), wide-ranging intellect and literary expertise by appointing him in 1925 to the board of his fledgling firm, Faber & Gwyer. The American author and editor Frank Morley (1899–1980), who joined the team in 1929, was to say of Faber: ‘His was … a very complicated, penetrative, sensitive, excitable and tolerant genius.’ (As is well known, Faber was disposed to tolerate the penchant for practical joking that his fellow directors sometimes indulged at his expense.) But above all, Faber, with the support of his wife Enid, had the vision and courage to launch Faber & Faber as a trade imprint, confident in the knowledge that Eliot would identify the pick of the poetry. A century on, it is easy to underestimate the enormous risk that Faber took. The American publisher Donald Brace scoffed at him in the 1920s, ‘Faber is a gambler’; and Brace’s equally famous publishing partner Alfred Harcourt dismissed Faber and his editorial team as ‘a bunch of Oxford amateurs; won’t last’. Faber was to express his grateful regard for Eliot in September 1953: ‘Let me say, Tom, simply that, poetry and publishing and plays put aside, – and that is to put aside something! – nothing better has ever happened to me, short of my wonderful good fortune in marriage, than the meeting with you which Charles Whibley planned twenty-five years ago, or thereabouts.’

Nowadays Geoffrey Faber may be best remembered as the brilliant businessman who enabled the Faber poetry list to become pre-eminent in the world, but it should never be forgotten that he himself loved poetry and was a notable poet in his own right. T. S. Eliot insisted upon this crucial point when he proclaimed at the memorial service for Faber: ‘First of all he was a poet: an admirer of George Meredith … Matthew Arnold was the poet with whom he had the closest affinity … We cannot understand Faber if we ignore the poet in him.’ The mutual esteem of Eliot, Faber and Morley, and their affectionate mockery of one another, are manifest in the splendidly funny poems they exchanged during evenings of wine and wit. The point of such exchanges was not self-congratulation, nor just a kind of jejune jocosity; the real point was that they shared a love of poetry and so inhabited the language and spirit of their favourite authors. They were perhaps the very last in that fine old tradition of poets who found it natural and necessary to trade pastiches, lampoons and ruderies. At the back of it all lay an unshakable confidence in one another’s intellectual capacities, professional judgement and unassailable goodwill. Frank Morley was to say of Eliot, some years after his death: ‘His was a large, serious spirit, undoubtedly one of the great ones, and of wonderful quick wit.’¹² Morley likewise told Helen Gardner, in 1978: ‘I loved him, as I think you know, near to the side of idolatry.’ In our more cynical age, few professional colleagues might so profess to love one another; but there is no doubt that Morley, who understood the weight of his words, meant precisely what he said.

Frank Vigor Morley (1899–1980), son of a distinguished mathematician – his brothers were the writer Christopher, and Felix (editor of the Washington Post) – was brought up in the USA before travelling as a Rhodes Scholar to New College, Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in mathematics. After working for a while at the Times Literary Supplement, he became London Manager of The Century Company (Publishers) of New York. Then he was recruited as a founding director of Faber & Faber, as Eliot related to his brother Henry on 19 October 1929:

I have got into the firm a very able American named Morley, a brother of Christopher Morley, to supply a business sense which I felt was wanting; who shares my room with me, and whom, fortunately, I find sympathetic … While congenial to everybody, he supplies an element of push and initiative, as well as of caution, which was very much needed in this rather close correct Oxford atmosphere of Faber & Faber.

Morley, in turn, would remark that Eliot’s ‘great skill’ as a publisher was that he ‘had an unerring gift for spotting talent, but he would never fight for people. I used to watch, and know him so well that if he quietly suggested publishing the poetry of Marianne Moore, whom nobody knew, I would take up the cudgels and be the loud hailer.’¹³

In 1933 when Eliot separated from his first wife Vivien, Morley arranged convivial temporary accommodation for him at his farmhouse at Pike’s Farm, Lingfield, Surrey. In 1939 he moved to the USA, where he became Vice-President of Harcourt Brace and Company (and during the war he served too on the National War Labor Board in Washington, DC). In 1947 he returned with his family to England, where he took up the post of Director at Eyre & Spottiswoode. A large, learned, ebullient figure, he earned the sobriquet ‘Whale’ – though not merely on account of corpulence: in his youth he had spent time aboard a whaling ship (he was revolted by the slaughter), and subsequently wrote (with J. S. Hodgson) Whaling North and South (1926), which was reviewed in the Monthly Criterion by his friend Herbert Read. His other writings include River Thames (1926), Inversive Geometry (1933), My One Contribution to Chess (1947), The Great North Road (1961), The Long Road West: A Journey in History (1971) and Literary Britain (1980).

Morley Kennerley, a Faber colleague, told The Times (25 Oct. 1980) that

one of [Frank Morley’s] hobbies was to work out complicated problems for his friends, and for those baffled there were amazing practical jokes. Convivial lunches with interesting people were a joy to him … He found jobs for many and squeezed me into Fabers where he generously put up with my sharing a corner of his room for some years. I was present all day during his interviews, dictation, visitors and often lunch. How he put up with all this I do not know. His correspondence with Ezra Pound was quite something, and I think he out-Pounded Pound. As his family say, he was a compulsive letter writer and was rarely without a pencil in his hand or pocket.

The other thing that these men shared was a fierce loyalty. ‘Eliot was loyal to all his friends, old and new’, wrote Peter du Sautoy in 1985. All the evidence goes to show that his friends reciprocated his confidence. Even John Hayward, who felt grievously let down when Eliot committed himself in 1957 to his happy second marriage, was at great pains in later years not to talk about Eliot’s private life and to head off the possible indiscretions of others. Just a few days after Eliot’s death in January 1965, for example, Nancy Cunard sent Hayward a poem depicting the young Eliot whom she had known in the 1910s as a ‘bitter-sweet dandy’; Hayward’s response was to enunciate with firm tact: ‘Of course I don’t mind your showing the poem to some choice friends, but I suggest that you should choose none who might conceivably take offence or objection to the intimate nature of the occasion recollected. You know how awful people can be – how prone to hint at “revelations”!’

On the other hand, it must also be said, Hayward was no mere sycophant, adulating Eliot’s every thought or seeking to bask in reflected glory, as some commentators have suggested. While he had the utmost admiration for Eliot as poet, he was less unequivocally enthusiastic about the poet’s prose writings. It seems to me almost a canard for Lyndall Gordon to have alleged, for example, in Eliot’s New Life (1988): ‘A devotee, hanging on Eliot’s lips, Hayward seems not to have recognized the Master’s inscrutable distance.’ Indeed, Gordon’s sniff must be seen to be unwittingly directed just as much at Eliot himself, who would not have put up with such a lickspittle as she imagines Hayward to have been – let alone have agreed to share a residence with him for a decade after the Second World War. From an early stage in their enduring friendship, Hayward would on occasion assess Eliot with an acerbic eye; he told Ottoline Morrell, for example, in November 1932,

I don’t think Bertrand Russell was entirely correct in saying that Tom’s manners were those of an Etonian. I should have thought that, at their best, Eton manners were characterized by an air of complete self-possession, a kind of ease which Tom has never quite attained. America is always breaking in! But he was certainly right about the window-dressing … I dare say this explains Tom’s obsession with European tradition, his love of formality, bowler hats, stiff collars, Royalism, old port, Classicism etc.!

He could be quite as coolly cutting in his estimate of his friend’s prose writings, as in this further confidence to Morrell (December 1932): ‘He’s too dry in his prose: no passion, scarcely any feeling at all. It’s odd, because his poetry is quite otherwise. Sometimes he makes me feel that he is frightened of giving himself away, or something away – I don’t know what. I have felt as much in his conversation.’ However, it is safe to say that Hayward’s appreciation of his friend’s writings in prose grew as the years moved on. Yet Hayward was always perfectly prepared to disagree with the ‘Master’ when he thought he was mistaken, and indeed to tell him so. Notably, he did not share Eliot’s religious faith – Hayward was an atheist – and had no hesitation in averring to Frank Morley, in a letter dating from March 1942: ‘For myself, though still unregenerate, I believe that “the idea of a Christian Society” is more likely to be realized by [the Archbishop of Canterbury’s] inspiration and guidance than along the lines propounded by Tom and his intellectually exclusive Christian Laity.’ He repeated in another place that he did not credit ‘Uncle Tom’s élite hierarchy’.

For the most part, however, he and Eliot enjoyed a tremendously fond accord in their tastes, social judgements and literary inclinations – and in their relish for sharing private jokes. For example: it is not widely known that it was Hayward who made up the epigraph to Stephen Potter’s satire The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (1937). David Bowen, with whom Hayward himself shared the secret, told me: ‘It is in the form of a piece of French poetry beginning: “Le Pauvre Muse deschinée” … and is signed Jean Aillevard – the transliteration of how a Frenchman might be expected to pronounce “John Hayward”. Incidentally this is not mentioned in the biography of Stephen Potter recently published [Alan Jenkins, Stephen Potter: Inventor of Gamesmanship (1980)]. A pity, as it seems to me a typical jeu d’esprit.’¹⁴ The epigraph to Potter’s The Muse in Chains – it is given on the title page – reads:

‘Pauvre Muse, deschirée et vilainée d’opinions¹⁵

phantasques, qui te liberera de la prison de

l’impudente ignorance où l’on te tient enfermée.’¹⁶

Jean Aillevard

Potter in his acknowledgements gave thanks ‘to Mr John Hayward for having given me my title and put in my way the quotation from which it was contrived’. But in truth the alias ‘Jean Aillevard’ was coined by Eliot in his letters to Hayward from 1935, in what he called his ‘DOSSIER AILLEVARD’.

Hayward provided in the 1930s a place and an occasion for these men of letters to relax in each other’s company out of office hours, and to regale one another with a sprightly exchange of verses. His local habitation in the large ground-floor front room of a lodging-house at 22 Bina Gardens, London SW7, where he resided from 23 March 1933 until November 1938¹⁷ – afforded an apt title for their gathering of complementary – but not complimentary – verses, which he arranged to have privately printed in August 1939 (in an edition of just twenty-five copies) by the genial and generous publisher Eric ‘Peter’ Gregory, Chair of the firm of Lund Humphries Ltd.¹⁸

Hayward’s life, activities and achievements have been well recounted in the opening chapter of Helen Gardner’s The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’ (1978), and in John Smart’s comprehensively-researched Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T. S. Eliot and Their Circle (2013). Here it is enough to say that, undaunted by the disability of a progressively paralysing disease, muscular dystrophy (which caused him sometimes to speak with an acidulous tongue), Hayward (1905–65) – who was some seventeen years younger than Eliot – resolved at an early age to make his mark in the world of letters. While still an undergraduate he edited the Nonesuch edition of Rochester’s works, so successfully that Edmund Gosse called him ‘the best and, in fact, only competent editor of Rochester’; and before the age of thirty he had managed the extraordinary feat of editing both the Nonesuch Donne and the Nonesuch Swift (including the first correct recension of Gulliver’s Travels to appear since the eighteenth century); an edition of the Letters of St Evremond; and a biography of Charles II which Graham Greene acclaimed as a ‘brilliant and satisfying character study’; as well as the first of his discerning anthologies. His brilliance as editor and bibliographer earned him a considerable reputation, and many writers came to depend on his editorial skills – not least Eliot with Four Quartets, the early plays and several of the mature essays. (Eliot valued his counsel not so much as an artist but as a technician: Hayward had a sure touch for style, syntax, idiom and sense.)

As early as 4 October 1935 Frank Morley posted this testimonial to his publishing pal C. A. Pearce (a senior editor at Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York): ‘John Hayward is a good man under the right influence. That’s about all that is needed in the way of biography. You may read him with a certainty of getting perfect truth.’ Paul Valéry formed such a high opinion of Hayward’s friendship and literary skill that he commissioned him to translate ‘Mon Faust’, and he had good reason to write towards the end of his life, ‘Je n’oublierai jamais Bina Gardens’, adding: ‘On a tant de besoin de voir des visages humains dans cette epoque de barbares.’ Morley would relate in April 1939:

As an instance of the breadth of Hayward’s acquaintance, he was the only Englishman for whom John O’Hara fell … One would find O’Hara and [James] Thurber and lads like that gravitating naturally to Hayward’s apartment, along with the intellectuals from Paris and the young and old of both sexes in London.

Morley was by no means exaggerating, for Thurber would himself write to Hayward in 1950: ‘Time runs on too fast and so many of the great joys are in the past, a lot of them in the London of John Hayward twelve years ago.’

In time, Hayward’s extraordinary circle of friends grew to include figures including Peter Quennell, Bruce Richmond (editor of the Times Literary Supplement), Rupert Hart-Davis, Dilys Powell, William Empson, C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Rosamond Lehmann, Ottoline Morrell, Cyril Connolly, Stevie Smith, Edith Sitwell and Elizabeth Bowen. Safe to say that Hayward, though he spent many hours alone in his study, reading and writing, was utterly gregarious by nature; as he happily owned in a letter to Anne Ridler (Christmas 1950): ‘I’m as much of a diner-out as my wicked ancestor Abraham Hayward who wrote “The Art of Dining”.’

Hayward started lunching regularly with Eliot from 1926, and came to know him more closely after taking up residence at Bina Gardens in 1933. Eliot promptly conceived a high regard for his young friend’s promise and early accomplishments; he wrote in a testimonial dated 10 June 1932:

I have followed Mr John Hayward’s work with interest ever since he came down from Cambridge to London. He has reviewed regularly for The Criterion and I have also read his contributions to the Times Literary Supplement and other papers.

His scholarship is considerable, his criticism acute, and his style admirable. I have found his reviewing in certain departments indispensable; but I have often expressed the wish that he might use his abilities in writing more literary essays, rather than in reviewing and editing, so that they might secure a wider recognition and express themselves in a more permanent form.

The soirées with Eliot, Faber and Morley that produced Noctes Binanianiae were in progress by the mid-1930s. (Eliot’s own lodgings, initially at Grenville Place, South Kensington, and then for the duration of the 1930s at an Anglican clergy-house on Emperors Gate, were a short walk away.) Forty years later, Morley was to inform Peter Croft (Archivist at King’s College, Cambridge): ‘In the late 1930s, though Eliot was the most frequent of visitors to Hayward at Bina Gardens, Faber and I (though for each of us it was more of a journey) also made fairly regular visits and were among Hayward’s cronies.’

Hayward rejoiced in his literary eminence and the extensive network of his friends (his ambiguous nickname ‘Tarantula’ referred not only to the sting of his wit but to the astonishing spread of his social web).¹⁹ He was being disingenuous when he wrote to Anne Ridler in 1944:

I must … discountenance, once again, the pleasing legend … that I hold court, or whatever the word is, to the Great & Good & Beautiful & Intelligent of the five continents. I can’t conceive how this popular fallacy arose, unless it is that my sedentary life & consequently relatively rare appearances in public places lead people to suppose that I’m unusually closeted with visitors! The legend is played up, you may recall, in the Master’s German verses in ‘Noctes Binanianae’.

(See Eliot’s ‘Abschied zur Bina’.)

Quite naturally, he was proud to be associated with so many authors of distinction, and especially with Eliot. Though skilled as a versifier, Hayward did not possess the exceptional creative gifts he did so much to nurture in others. However, like Eliot, Faber and Morley, he was devoted to poetry (indeed, he once claimed to have read the whole of English literature, by which he must have meant the established canon), and he began to write his own poetry even as an adolescent. His mother was to remind him in 1943, ‘You began versifying at a very early age in the last Great War … Sir Humphry Davy [an ancestor] wrote poetry & like other gentlemen valued that side of his genius more than what brought him fame, his chemical & medical & industrial researches.’²⁰ Moreover, like all expert composers of comic and nonsense verse, including Eliot, Faber and Morley, he kept at heart the poetry he had loved as a child, the freshness of the child within the adult, the child’s ear and eye. As his father marvelled at the man, ‘Children so appeal to you – how many godchildren have you got? – and you have kept your own child life so fresh.’²¹

Biographers and critics of Eliot have had relatively few good words to say about Noctes Binanianae. They sometimes appear to disdain the very idea that grown men – even men of such large intelligence, sophistication and perspicacity as Eliot and his circle – should write superbly witty verses for their mutual delectation, let alone read them aloud to one another of an evening. Yet there is a fine long-standing tradition of such convivial colloquies – the fruits of drinking and japing – including the delightfully imagined exchanges of Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35), as arranged by the Scottish advocate, author and critic James Wilson (1785– 1854), and involving John Gibson Lockhart and James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd) – which Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue identify as the primary forebear in their authoritative edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2 vols, Faber & Faber, 2015). Geoffrey Faber was to recall the get-togethers with immense pleasure, as he wrote to Hayward in the black period of August 1943: ‘I look back constantly at those Nights when our extemporisations ravish’d the ears of the neighbours in Bina Gardens.’ And Faber had keenly noted in his diary on 16 June 1939: ‘Coot & whale were our respective totems in the quadripartite correspondence w. TSE (elephant) & John Hayward (tarantula).’ ‘Quadripartite correspondence’ are two crucial words; indeed, all of the contributors continued to feel gratified with this special coterie collaboration.

The title Noctes Binanianae, coined by Eliot himself,²² is an allusion to Horace’s Sixth Satire: ‘O noctes coenæquae deum!’ l. 65 (‘O nights and supper of the gods!’); in Alexander Pope’s translation, ‘An Imitation of the Sixth Satire of the Second Book of Horace’, ll. 133–6, ‘O charming Noons! and Nights divine!/Or when I sup, or when I dine,/My Friends above, my Folks below,/Chatting and laughing all-a-row.’ One other notable precedent could be the Kit-Cat Club, orchestrated in the 1690s by the publisher Jacob Tonson, whose literary circle included William Congreve and John Vanbrugh: see Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation (2008). Also relevant in the background might be the activities of the Crochallan Fencibles, the Edinburgh drinking club at which Robert Burns is thought to have recited bawdy verses including ‘Not for Maids’ – otherwise known as ‘Nine Inch Will Please a Lady’. (The Crochallan Inn also turns up in Burns’s version of ‘Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie’ [1788].)

While Hayward was the chef d’orchestre of the undertaking to publish this collaborative project, Eliot was at all times constructively engaged with it. He wrote to Hayward as early as 22 November 1937, in eager anticipation:

This matter of the en-tete [heading] is very difficult. Your suggestion is admirable in itself but I wonder … I mean … perhaps there is enough Vapulation of the Coot in the text, and I should like the Title to suggest collaboration between the Coot and others … Besides, the possum should not be too forward … perhaps some such title as originally proposed by me

NOCTES BINANIANAE

Wherein are contained such Voluntary & Satyrical Compliments and Verses as were lately Exchang’d between some of the Choicest Wits and Most Profound Deipnosophists of the AGE

(Ornament or Emblem of a Coot,

or other Absurd Bird), or Figure

in which is tapaster’d an Elephant,

upon whose back capers a Whale, upon

whose head a Coot with wings extended,

holding in his mouth a stockfish, and

above all a Vesperal Spider suspended,

which spinneth his Web about all.

Imprinted for Rchd. de la Mare, His Maiestie’s Printer, dwelling in Paules Churchyard,

at the South west doore of Saint Paules Church, and are there to be had.²³

But I am mixing the periods. Anyway, what about the capital point?²⁴

The happy truth is that Eliot was the very spirit of such occasions, and that the others rose to the example, and the challenge, that he set them. The wonderful exordium ‘How to Pick a Possum’, for example, which was written in September 1937, was possibly confected with a view to its inclusion in Old Possum’s Book; but then Eliot found a better place for it as the opening poem of Noctes Binanianae: it is not a whit inferior to anything in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Dame Helen Gardner had it absolutely right when she wrote that, just as Old Possum’s Book is ‘a memorial of Eliot’s friendship with Hayward at this time’, so too Noctes Binananiae is the ‘memorial of the meeting of these friends’: the two collections complement one another to a high degree. But the most conspicuously pleasurable feature of the verses of Noctes Binanianae is that they add up to a remarkable anthology of parodies, pastiches and satires – spoofing everything from Shakespeare and Milton to Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Edward Lear, and not forgetting popular song. Lovers of literature may revel in them as much as fans of light verse in general delight in Old Possum’s Book, if it be only for that kick of recognition.

It feels something of a shame to extract Eliot’s verses from the boon companions which fundamentally complement them. Each poem in the sequence takes off from the one before and seems to be trumped by the next. The second poem in the sequence, for example – Faber’s sonnet beginning ‘Arboreal though the natural habitat/Of Possums …’ – is specifically entitled ‘An Answer to the Foregoing Poem’, and so Eliot’s buoyantly satirical ‘The O’Possum Strikes Back’ duly follows as a riposte. (Incidentally, these were men who knew their popular reputations and had the good sense not to take themselves too seriously in such appointed roles: Faber’s ‘An Answer to the Foregoing Poem’ originally sported the subtitle ‘Addressed to the Rev. Uncle Possum by his unworthy coadjutor, Father Faber’.) The effect is like a series of turns at the music-hall: high spirits are disciplined by form, and the pace and exuberant interplay of the poems are joyously sustained. Moreover, the sequence is evidently the product of creative responsiveness. Just as Eliot invited formative participation in both The Waste Land and Four Quartets, so too the poems he wrote for Noctes Binanianae are the fruit of a generative partnership. He responded eagerly to creative collaboration quite as much as he delighted in constructive criticism.

John Haffenden

Note To the Reader

The poems included in Noctes Binanianae constitute a historical document and are reproduced in their original form. The work contains instances of language and terminology that are now considered offensive or inappropriate by contemporary standards. Such language is retained solely to preserve the historical accuracy and authenticity of the work and does not reflect the views or values of the present publisher.

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Abbreviations Used in Notes