Ode to a Roman Coot

JDH note: ‘A choice wit of the period, a lover of architectural fantasy.’

‘The Fantasy of Fonthill’ refers to the construction by the eccentric bisexual visionary William Beckford (1760–1844) – politician, plantation owner, author of the Gothic novel Vathek (1786), lover of books, fine art and buildings, and abuser of boys (he was outed for having a sexual affair with the eleven-year-old son of the 2nd Viscount Courtenay) – of the tremendous mock-Gothic private house called Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, which he began in 1796 to a design by the fashionable architect James Wyatt (1746–1813), architect to George III. At the age of ten, Beckford inherited a fortune from his father, a Whig politician and businessman who owned substantial sugar plantations and 3,000 slaves in the West Indies: Lord Byron called William Beckford ‘England’s Wealthiest Son’. In all, William received an inheritance of £1,000,000 in cash and an annual income of c. £100,000, which enabled him to indulge his extraordinary fancies. The upshot was Fonthill Abbey, a gigantic richly-decorated building measuring 270 feet from east to west, 312 feet from north to south, with eighteen bedrooms, and with the structure topped by a madly-conceived and ill-constructed tower rising to 350 feet – about as high as Westminster Cathedral – and with 35-foot-high doors. The tower, built of timber and cement, could not sustain itself and fell down after ten years in 1800 (it was rebuilt), while Beckford went on accumulating his fabulous art collection and a library of over ten thousand volumes (he even bought the library of Edward Gibbon). Illustrious visitors included Lord Nelson and Sir William and Lady Hamilton. By 1822, with the collapse of the sugar market, Beckford was obliged to sell Fonthill and withdraw to Bath where he built a more enduring erection, the Graeco-Roman Lansdown Tower: standing 800 feet above sea level, with views over Wiltshire and the Bristol Channel, it is a folly which stands to this day. On 21 Dec. 1825, the new owner of Fonthill Abbey found his investment to be futile: the tower collapsed for good and all.

See further Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London: F&F, 1979).

John Betjeman (1906–84): poet, journalist, authority on architecture (he was for many years on the staff of the Architectural Review); and highly popular radio and TV broadcaster. He was taught by TSE at Highgate School, London, in 1916, and was C. S. Lewis’s first pupil at Magdalen College, Oxford – which he left without taking a degree. Author of volumes of verse including Mount Zion (1931), Ghastly Good Taste (1933), Old Lights for New Chancels (1940), A Few Late Chysanthemums (1954), Poems in the Porch (1954), Collected Poems (1958) and the autobiographical sequence Summoned by Bells (1960), which includes memories of TSE. Awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 1960; knighted, 1969; appointed Poet Laureate, 1972. See also n.5 to ‘Abschied zur Bina’ below.

See too JDH, ‘Letter to a Reader … VI (London, January)’, Bonniers litterära magasin 15:

There are the artists of the neo-romantic school whose masters are John Piper and Graham Sutherland. And there are also the amateurs or dilettanti, somewhat mischievously led on by John Betjeman, who pretend to a passionate love of the ‘gothick’, and who, given a chance would, I have no doubt, promote a fashion for grottoes, haunted chambers, ivy-mantled towers and all the rest of the modern inconveniences of a Fonthill or a Strawberry Hill.

JDH note: ‘A pseudo-aunt & housekeeper in the Temple of that famous figure Mr Foster.’ The ‘Temple’ is the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in London.

John Galway Foster (1903–82) graduated in 1924 with a first-class degree in History from New College, Oxford, and was elected to a Fellowship of All Souls, where he became acquainted with Geoffrey Faber. He then studied law, and was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1927, specializing in private international law and tax law; appointed QC in 1950. He was lecturer in private international law at Oxford, 1934–9, and at the Hague; Recorder of Dudley, 1936–8, and of Oxford, 1938–51, 1956–64. From 1939 he served as First Secretary and legal adviser to the British Embassy in Washington, and subsequently as legal adviser to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. For his wartime service he was awarded the Legion of Honour, the American Legion of Merit, and the Croix de Guerre. In 1945 he became Conservative MP for the Northwich division of Cheshire, holding the seat until retirement in 1974; and he served as Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 1951–4. He was a foremost figure in the setting up of the European Convention on Human Rights, and he worked with Miriam Rothschild in securing safety in the UK for German Jews, and compensation for them. Knighted in 1964.

See Miriam Rothschild’s warm memoir ‘Sir John Foster and the Jews’ at the website of the Rothchild Foster Human Rights Trust: https://rothschildfostertrust.com. Rothschild emphasizes Foster’s sparkling sense of humour, his love of anecdote, gossip and laughter – qualities which must have endeared him to the Bina circle. Foster dined chez Hayward, along with Faber and Eliot, on Monday, 28 March 1938.

‘John Foster’s Aunt’ glances too at the hugely popular farce Charley’s Aunt (1892), by Brandon Thomas (1848–1914).

On 12 Feb. 1939 TSE posted to GCF and his wife Enid a typescript skit headed ‘THE AUTOLYCAN INTELLIGENCER: Once a Week For Private Circulation Only edited by John Foster’s Aunt, Vol. I, No. 15’:

ANGLO-AMERICAN TENSION: The Staff of the German Embassy in Washington are chuckling over an incident which, while it has so far been kept out of the news, has gone far to disturb Anglo-American relations. It appears that the text of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s new play (‘The Family Reunion’ – we understand that it is based on the theme of ‘Blood is thicker than water’) was sent over to his New York publishers containing the phrase ‘block house’. Later, a corrected text was received from the London publishers, in which the term ‘block house’ had been replaced by ‘stockade’. Somehow or other, this alteration leaked out, and reached the ears of Senator Jones Snoot of Montana, the inveterate enemy of Anglo-American understanding. Senator Snoot raised the question at a secret meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee. ‘If them kind of censorship is tolerated’, barked Senator Snoot, chewing his cigar in the way so well known to cartoonists, ‘it comes to a virtual suppression of U.S.A. culture in the American-speaking Dominions under the British flag.’ The incident has led to a realignment of forces in the Foreign Relations Committee; and has brought together in alliance with Senator Snoot – the Great Cornhusker – his old enemies Senator Hugh Cabot Jones of Massachusetts (glad of any opportunity, it is said, to down an Eliot) and Senator Joe Claiborne Pinckney of Georgia. Meanwhile, the wire keeps buzzing between Washington and London. The First Secretary of the American Embassy in London, answering our telephone enquiry, said: ‘The Ambassador is in retreat in Connemara, and we can answer no questions.’ No importance is attached to the fact that Mr. Julian Huxley has just given a party to introduce the German Ambassador officially to the Giant Panda.

John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ll. 1–10:

JDH note: ‘A whisky whose vile flavour could be recognised by a man blind-fold.’

Karl A. Menninger (1893-1990), American psychiatrist, was author of The Human Mind (1930) and Man Against Himself (1938). (TSE’s spelling ‘Meninger’ has been emended.)

JDH note: ‘In the north of London, the seat of Mr F.’

‘villas numberless’ – variant: ‘loonies numberless’.

GCF’s typescript has this side-note: ‘Can the poet be thinking of Mr Unwin? See Kelly’s Guide to Hampstead.’ Sir Stanley Unwin (1884–1968), publisher, lived just over the road from Faber in Frognal. GCF wrote in his diary, 13 June 1939, of Unwin: ‘His efficiency & his apparent liberalism of thought do, I think, cover a very narrow personality.’

Matthew Arnold, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, ll. 71–4:

‘… hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet’: W. B. Yeats, ‘Michael Robartes Bids his Beloved Be at Peace’, l. 12.

JDH note: ‘In Oxford, where Mr F. passed his week-ends.’

‘Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe’: Matthew Arnold, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, l. 74 (cited in Poems II, 222).

‘The pleasant whining of a mandoline’: The Waste Land, l. 261 (Poems I, 64).

‘The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall’: Arnold, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, l. 129 (cited in Poems II, 222).

Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ll. 61–70:

Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ll. 24–7:

JDH note: ‘Mr. F. was much addicted to this luxury.’

GCF was an habitué of Nevill’s Charing Cross Turkish Bath for Gentlemen at 25 Northumberland Avenue, London, in part because he mistakenly believed that a good sweat bath enabled him to lose weight. The Turkish Baths, which could serve dozens of men, occupied the basement, ground floor, and second floor of the purpose-built building, all decorated in Moorish style. Over the road was the Metropole Hotel.

One fictional client of the Northumberland Avenue establishment was Sherlock Holmes, as related by Dr Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’ (1924): ‘Both Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else. On the upper floor of the Northumberland Avenue establishment there is an isolated corner where two couches lie side by side, and it was upon these that we lay on September 3, 1902, the day when my narrative begins.’

Another patron of the same Turkish Baths was E. W. Hornung (1866–1921), author of the famous series of stories about the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles.

GCF’s diary, 2 Jan. 1926: ‘Spent much of day in Turkish Bath. Weight going up alas! (13.9 before: 13.7 after).’

GCF’s diary, 2 Aug. 1927: ‘Turkish Bath. Weight at end 12.11—a good stone below what I was two months ago: the result of massage, diet, exercises, Carlsbad cure, & T. baths. Can I keep myself to 13 stone, I wonder?’

GCF’s diary, 24 July 1941: ‘Went to T. Bath at 5; weight, on going in 13.4½, on coming out 13.1.’

GCF’s diary, 7 Mar. 1932: ‘7 Mar. ‘Drove up from Oxford with Enid; & then down to Northumberland Avenue Baths …’

JDH note: ‘At this point the unknown poet himself seems to have become fuddled, and imagined that he was addressing the late Wm. Wordsworth.’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, ll. 47–8:

Sylvia Lewin to Haffenden, 11 Oct. 1979: ‘I was tidying some drawers [at Cheyne Walk] and found in one of them, mixed up with rubber bands and so forth, a small book. “What’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ doing here?” “Oh, do be careful,” said John Hayward, “that’s Coleridge’s copy.”’

‘Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth …’ John Milton, ‘Lycidas’, l. 163 (cited in Poems II, 223).

See Rudyard Kipling, Jungle Book, ch. 11 – ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ – for the story of how the 67-year-old elephant Kala Nag (‘Black Snake’) – who ‘stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been cut off short at five feet’ – bears Little Toomai into the forest to enable him to witness the nighttime dance of the elephants (cited in Poems II, 224).

John Milton, ‘Lycidas’, 157–67: