Alice Thomas Ellis, Penelope Fitzgerald, and more

In the comments to my recent post on Alice Thomas Ellis, reader zmkc left a link to a post she'd written about Ellis's husband, Colin Haycraft, an editor who was at least in part responsible for shepherding not only Ellis, but also Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge into print.

If you enjoy any of those writers, zmkc's post is well worth checking out. Along with some delicious quotations from one of Ellis's novels, she also reflects on the pleasures afforded by the brevity of the work of all three women:

As well as providing us with the pleasure of Bainbridge, Fitzgerald and Ellis's writing, Haycraft also argued in defence of the short novel (apparently, he wrote something called 'a satire' on the subject for the Times Literary Supplement, but, as it was well before the advent of the internet, I can find no trace of it). I support that view, not because I don't enjoy Dickens or George Eliot or Tolstoy, but because I think the lengthy novels that are published nowadays are rarely up to the standard of their predecessors. Nowadays they are often really just sloppily edited - or completely unedited - short novels (there's a slim volume lurking inside every fat volume, or something like that).

Oh, and there's a bonus of some A. N. Wilson-bashing, a pastime I always enjoy. Much as I appreciate his biography of Tolstoy and his book on the Victorians, I feel he's still got a ways to go before he's fully paid out for the jaw-dropping mean-spirited pettiness of his memoir of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley.

As for Alice Thomas Ellis, I'm sure you'll be hearing more from me soon--I'm waiting impatiently for the Chicago Public Library to dig up copies of a couple more of her novels.

"Tolstoy's truest prayer was the manuscript of Hadji Murad"

One of my tiny goals in writing this blog is to make it one of the first places people land following searches for information about Tolstoy's last fiction, the posthumously published novella Hadji Murat (1912). I've raved about the book before: though one of the least well-known of Tolstoy's works, it's the perfect introduction to his genius, offering in a mere hundred-plus pages glimpses of both his unmatched eye for telling detail and the seemingly endless wells of sympathy that underlie his characterizations. At the same time, when set next to his early novel The Cossacks, which is set in the same region, Hadji Murat serves as a clear demonstration of the growth of his skill and perception. Despite the fact that the The Cossacks was based largely on Tolstoy's own experiences as a young man, while Hadji Murat was created through research, it is the earlier novel that at times feels imagined or constructed, while the later novel never feels less than fully lived.

In Tolstoy and the Novel (1966), John Bayley writes that "some portraits in the story are as life-giving and complete as those in War and Peace," while Viktor Shklovsky, in Energy of Delusion (1981), not only makes the grand claim of this post's headline, but also writes, "Among his great works, Tolstoy has one that's the best. It's Hadji Murad." The tale's place at the end of Tolstoy's ouevre is given a further poignancy by the fact that even as he wrote it, Tolstoy was actively denying to himself that literature had value. As A. N. Wilson explains in Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

While he was writing it between 1896 and 1904, so little did its subject matter accord with mainstream Tolstoyan pacifism that he felt obliged to work on it "on the quiet" and, by the time he had completed the Shakespeare essay and persuaded himself that literature was evil or a waste of time, Hadji Murat was laid aside.

Wilson explains that though Tolstoy denigrated his achievement, his wife, even as their long-running marital wars were reaching fever pitch, treasured the book, writing in her diary,

I have done nothing but copy out Hadji Murat. It's so good! I simply couldn't tear myself away from it.

What brings me back to Hadji Murat today is a letter I came across in the second volume of R. F. Christian's two-volume collection of Tolstoy's letters. Written from Yasnaya Polyana in January of 1903 to Anna Avessalomovna Korganova, the widow of the army officer who had guarded Hadji Murat after he had crossed over to the Russian side in the perpetual war in the Caucasus, it reveals Tolstoy even at that late date searching for specific details to give his portrait of the charismatic rebel leader the force of reality.

Dear Anna Avessalomovna,

Your son, Ivan Iosifovich, having learned that I am writing about Hadji Murat, was kind enough to tell me many details about him and, moreover, permitted me to turn to you with a request for more detailed information about the naib Shamil who lived with you at Nukha. Although Ivan Iosifovich's information is very interesting, many things might have been unknown to him or wrongly understood by him, since he was only a ten-year-old boy at the time. I am venturing therefore to turn to you, Anna Avessolomovna, with the request to answer certain questions of mine and to tell me all you remember about this man and about his escape and tragic end.

Any detail about his life during his stay with you, his appearance and his relations with your family and other people, any apparently insignificant detail which has stuck in your memory, will be very interesting and valuable to me.

My questions are as follows:

1. Did he speak even a little Russian?
2. Whose were the horses on which he tried to escape--his own, or ones given to him? And were they good horses, and what colour were they?
3. Did he limp noticeably?
4. Did the house where you lived upstairs, and he downstairs, have a garden?
5. Was he strict in observing Mohammedan rituals, the five daily prayers etc.

Forgive me, Anna Avessalomovna, for troubling you with such trifles, and accept my sincere gratitude for everything you do to carry out my request.

I remain, with the utmost respect, at your service,
Lev Tolstoy

P.S. Another question (6) What were the murids like who were with Hadji Murat and escaped with him, and how did they differ from him?

And yet another question (7) Did they have rifles on them when they escaped?

It's the hurried questions in the postscript that really bring Tolstoy to life in this letter; like a good friend lingering at a dinner party because there's still so much more to talk about, he can't help but want to know more, more, more. I love question six in particular, the way its request for what are essentially brief character studies rests on an implicit confidence that the discernment and descriptive powers of a master novelist--what Shklovsky calls "Tolstoy's strength and ability to construct the temple of the human soul"--are available to any stranger to call on when asked.

The letter seems to support what Shklovsky, in his typically fervid fashion, notes about Tolstoy's work on this novel in his last years:

[E]ven when he was sick and close to death, Tolstoy was still doing research for this novel. He demanded books, checking the details in them. . . . When Tolstoy finished Hadji Murad, he lifted himself up on the arms of his chair and said: that's how it should be, yes, that's how it should be.

And there he was, a mountaineer, heading straight toward the bullets.

He was singing a song.

As I've urged before: read Hadji Murat. You won't regret it.

"A selection of rambles around very familiar themes"

I'm going to have to at least take a look at V. S. Naipaul's new book, A Writer's People, even if I don't buy it, because all the early reviews have mentioned Naipaul's dismissal of Anthony Powell--an impressively ungenerous act, considering that the two were friends for decades.

If A. N. Wilson--himself seemingly a cranky bastard of the first order, but far more entertaining these days than Naipaul--is correct in this piece for the Telegraph, Naipaul's critique of Powell is insubstantial and unconvincing. Wilson cites the particularly damning (and, in the case of late Naipaul, not surprising) point that Naipaul seems to have completely missed Powell's comedy, a form at which Powell is equalled only by a handful of other writers I know. Wilson's overall take, expressed with typical bluntness, is that Naipaul

seems to have slipped from being a great writer who is occasionally idiotic into being an old bore who does not know when he is making a fool of himself,

which does seem to be a good description of someone who goes around telling everyone that the novel "has run out of things to say."

I do very much like some of Naipaul's work, in particular The Enigma of Arrival (1987), which at the time I first read it seemed to share a tone, and possibly even a heart, with Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a book I reread with much pleasure. Naipaul's and Jewett's narrators both describe remote places--rural England and the desolate fishing villages of Maine, respectively--where they are outsiders; but that very position of exclusion allows them to focus their penetrating attention to really see and understand these beautiful locales, with their rich history and uncertain future. Both narrators seem barely removed from their creators, and while neither they nor their creators are ever quite able to feel at home in these places, through their attention they allow us to do so. I'm drawing on decade-old memories of reading the books back-to-back, but my memory is of a connection as strong as it was unexpected, an undeniable kinship stretching across a century.

Naipaul's book on the American South, A Turn in the South (1989), on the other hand, struck me as an interesting, useful book for anyone who was already familiar with the South--someone, for example, who like me grew up just north of the Mason-Dixon line. His outsider's approach, in this case, helps us to see the familiar anew. But while I'm no fan of Southern history or culture, I think it likely that someone approaching Naipaul's book without some local knowledge would come away with both a slightly incorrect and a slightly harsher opinion of the region than is appropriate--which made me wonder about the quality of the confident judgments and pronouncements that fill his book about traveling in some Muslim nations, Among the Believers (1981).

Oddly, I've never read the novel that many consider Naipaul's masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Perhaps once I've looked at his piece on Powell, if I find myself agreeing with A. N. Wilson that Naipaul has descended to simply "making an ass of himself," I'll give Mr. Biswas a try. Though it's sad to watch a sharp thinker and talented writer go wrong, it's useful to remind oneself that their good work in the past remains. Knowing about their present activities will change how we read the work--there's no way around that--but it takes a near-superhuman effort of idiocy to fully destroy a good book.

Labor Day weekend notes

A type of blog post that I tend to really enjoy, but which I don’t make myself very often because it feels lazy, is a notes post. But all week I’ve been accumulating little bits of stuff that really don’t have a place other than in a notes column, so here you go.

1) Thinking back to my post from earlier this week about progressivism and certainty, I keep imagining a slogan built from my thoughts: “Vote Democrat. We’re the party of Job.” Or “Vote Democrat. We won’t pretend to know, but we’ll give it our best shot.”

The Republican ads, of course, would be along the lines of, “The Democrats promise to give you boils and kill your family and your livestock. It happened to Job, and it’ll happen to you.”

2) Speaking of politics, I assume you noticed that about ten days ago, the White House released George W. Bush’s reading list for the summer. His reading of The Stranger, which enormous-headed White House flack Tony Snow discussed with the media, got most of the attention—which isn’t unreasonable, because based on the limited evidence at hand I’m actually willing to believe Bush actually read it.

As for the other books on the list, though? I call bullshit. He’s got some good John D. MacDonald detective novels on there, and I’m willing to believe he’s read, say, two of them. There are a couple of Flashman novels, and I’ll give him one. But has he really read Kai Bird and Martin Sherman’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus? (Would he even be able to give a four-sentence explanation of who Oppenheimer is?) Or Ronald White’s very serious book about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural? Could he possibly have read Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan? And, if so, did he learn anything about the complexity that underlies his black-and-white statements about peoples and nations?

The main reason I call bullshit, though? He’s got 48 books on his summer reading list. Now, I know that our Derelict in Chief takes a lot of time off. But I, a fast reader who spends my non-work time doing little else, get through, at most, 110 books a year. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the President of the United States—whose lack of dedication to his job is surely counterbalanced in this case by his evident stupidity—can find time to read 48 books in a summer?

These people reflexively lie about every single damn thing. If they tell you you’re alive and well, you probably ought to go ahead and stagger to the morgue.

3) Someone who’s honest about not reading? Cincinnati Reds outfielder Adam Dunn, who claims to have read only two books since high school: Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and a young adult novel called The Summer of the Monkeys. Give me dumb and honest any day, especially if it comes with prodigious home run power.

4) Thinking about the morgue reminds me that the best thing I read this week was a short story by Will McIntosh called “Followed,” in the most recent issue of a journal called Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which is a product of Small Beer Press (best known as Kelly Link’s publisher). “Followed” is a zombie story, and like all good zombie stories, it’s a also a commentary on contemporary society—but it’s the sharpest I’ve ever come across. In the world McIntosh has created, people are followed around by reanimated corpses whose deaths they have caused, directly or indirectly, through their grotesque overconsumption.

She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. . . . Strange how most TV shows depicted the world as corpseless. Nary a corpse to be seen on the sitcoms, cop shows, interactives—all those people, walking the streets, working, and not one of the followed by a corpse.

“Followed” is well worth the price of the journal itself. You can order it here.

5) Speaking of reanimation, I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but don’t you think it would be fun to bring Borges back and show him the Wikipedia? As my friend Bob pointed out the other night, the author of “Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” would surely thrill to the fact that the entries for Kashyyk and Tattoine outstrip, in length and detail, the entries for, say, Saturn and Neptune.

He would also, surely, appreciate that empty feeling you get at the end of an evening spent in the byways of the Web, wandering, and not necessarily ever finding what you started out looking for:

Unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

6) Something else I think Borges would have appreciated is the literary hoax recently perpetrated by an anonymous enemy of English writer A. N. Wilson. Wilson, many of whose books I love, but who seems to be a monstrous prick (His memoir of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley is the most mean-spirited and petty book I’ve ever read.) was suckered into including in his recent biography of poet John Betjeman a letter that was a complete forgery.

The forgery came to light when its unknown author (suspected to be the author of another recent Betjeman biography), who had supplied the letter to Wilson under the name of Eve de Harben (an anagram of "Ever been had?") wrote to the Sunday Times of London, revealing that the letter was a forgery . . . and that the initial letters of each of the sentences of the missive, taken in order, spelled out “A. N. Wilson is a shit."

Nearly as much fun, for me, was that the letter refers to Anthony Powell:

Anthony Powell has written to me, and mentions you admiringly. Some of his comments about the Army are v. funny. He's somebody I'd like to know better when the war is over. I find his letters funnier than his books.

7) And, on the topic of things that don’t exist, my friend and former co-worker Erin says:

I tried to post a comment to your blog but it wouldn't let me! I dreamed a few nights ago that I wrote a book called Scurry and that I had to approve the cover design (a b/w photo of a fully dressed woman sitting at the tide line of a Scottish-looking beach) while talking on a cell phone and driving in traffic. What’s with all the book dreams?

All I could tell Erin was that if she’ll actually publish Scurry, I’ll write about it here.

8) Boswell, in his London Journal, records some advice that we bloggers should probably take to heart:

I read [Lord Erskine] a little of [my journal] this evening. To be sure it is very carelessly wrote, which he freely took notice, and said it might become a habit to me to write in that manner, so that I would learn a mere slatternly style. He advised me to take more pains upon it, and to render it useful by being a good method to practice writing: to turn periods and render myself ready at different kinds of expression. He is very right. I shall be more attentive for the future, and rather give a little neatly done than good deal slovenly.

9) And, finally, since my book-laden return from Portland (and Powell’s) in early July, I’ve only bought four books. Well, unless you count the four Hard Case Crime books that came in the mail. Or the couple of New York Review Books that a friend sent me. Or the mystery novel my dad lent me.

Regardless, I’ve made progress. For the first time in several years, I’ve got fewer unread books in the house than I did two months ago.

It’s important, in these late-summer days, to enjoy small victories. Enjoy the holiday.

Life stories

I spent two days flying last week, and as I read Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), I remembered why I like to pack biographies when I travel. With nothing to distract me except the occasional, accidental sight of Martin Lawrence parading around in a dress on the screen above me, I can fully sink into the details of a life. Immersed for hours, uninterrupted by work or the need to listen for my L stop, I’m able to fully enter the subject’s world. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, peripheral as they may be, become firmly placed; I don’t have to consult the index to remind myself of who’s who. For a while, I nearly live the life I read.

I had already been thinking about completed lives, and what remains of a life. Even the quietest of us leaves a lot behind—stories, letters, legal records, collections—and a good biographer can fashion those elements into a coherent narrative of a whole person. Some biographies, like Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys (2002) (the best biography I’ve read), reveal a subject livelier, wiser, and more likable than we expected; others, like A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy (1986), lead us—and the author—from admiration to astonished disgust. Regardless, a person’s life is rebuilt, assembled from scattered pieces and presented anew, giving us here the perspective of a close friend, there that of a secret diary, and elsewhere that of history. An anecdote gives a glimpse of a moment in time, and someone forever gone is returned. It’s hard to imagine a greater honor.

But most of us are never the subject of biographies. Our letters remain unread by anyone but the recipient, our diaries (unless we put them on the Internet) gather dust, and our secrets, successes, and failures remain, as we would surely prefer, our own. What lingers after us are the stories people remember and retell, the stories they repeat to each other over the years, and maybe, if we’re lucky, pass down to their children and grandchildren. For the promise that such stories would live on, Achilles was willing to sacrifice his life. Few of us are as needy as Achilles; we don't have to sacrifice our lives. We just have to live them.

So I learn that Stacey’s grandmother, on discovering that a young Stacey had managed to climb onto the roof of the garage, admonished her, not to get down, but to wear shoes up there, because the roof was dirty. And that, when asked about the internment camps that she and other Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed to in the early years of World War II, she spoke not about the deprivation, but of the people she met there and the crafts they made. And that she darned Stacey's father's socks, and she turned his collars, so that he assumed for years that everyone practiced such economies.

Or I remember that I’ll have to tell my nephew about my Great-Grandpa Colonel, an auctioneer, born late in the nineteenth century, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, but who, living his whole life in Kansas, experienced a very different twentieth century. I've been told that once he bought a new shed at an auction and, knowing that Great-Grandma Inez would not agree that they needed a second shed, attempted to hide it by placing it behind the first shed. The ploy failed. When my father first met him, on an unbearably humid Kansas night in the late 1960s, Colonel offered him ice cream, then revealed a reach-down freezer holding a dozen different flavors. My father knew from that point that he and Colonel would get along just fine. And I remember that into his early nineties Colonel, an inattentive but enthusiastic driver, delivered meals-on-wheels to housebound old folks.

Then there was my Great-Grandmother Marie. Elegant, patrician, and a bit imperious, she never seemed quite certain about children, though she was always kind to us great-grandkids. Her daughter, my Great-Aunt Mary, had a labrador retriever named Gator, who had a pet rock that he carried in his mouth. He removed it only to eat, and if it somehow went missing, the whole household was enlisted in a careful search. Years of carrying the rock wore the teeth on the right side of Gator's mouth to nubs.

And thus we keep our past and its people with us. Near the end of Wendell Berry’s elegiac novel Jayber Crow (2000) Jayber, who, being younger than most of his friend and acquaintances, has outlived most of them, thinks

I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn’t know I had ever thought. “Forty years” or “Fifty years” or “Sixty years,” I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. one by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cots. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

But the rest of us remain, and we speak of our friends.

Living one's ideals

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

You cant disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out of it for you. Because as far as they care you are the same as saying their lives are nothing and this always bothers people, because people prefer anything to being nothing, look at the Nazis, and that is why they tie their lives to things.

From A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

Pregnancy had become an almost permanent condition of life for Tolstoy’s unfortunate wife. Little Lev had hardly been weaned before she feared herself to be once more with child. “With each child,” she wrote philosophically in her journal, “one sacrifices a little more of one’s life and accepts an even heavier burden of perennial anxieties and illnesses.”

But for her husband, the thought of new minds to educate, new little beings to boss into a correct way of viewing the world was irresistibly tempting.

As so often happened when Tolstoy embarked upon something with repellent intentions, he produced sublime results.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

He had learned that Warden would not do that, that that old private line of equity, drawn with such sharpness with such close secrecy that it was wholly invisible to everyone but Warden, would not let the big man take advantage of the situation in that way. . . . It was, Prew often thought, as if The Warden had applied to his whole life the principle which applied to all other games of sport—that laying down of certain arbitrary rules to make success that much harder for the player to attain, like clipping in football or traveling in basketball, or in the same way, as he had read someplace, that sporting fishermen would use the light six-nine tackle in fighting for sailfish instead of the heavy tackle that makes it easy for the novice, thereby imposing upon themselves voluntarily the harder conditions that make the reward worth more to them. But where fishermen only did it on their day off or on vacation, to gain some obscure satisfaction that the cut- throat business ethics of their lives no longer gave them, The Warden applied it to his whole life, and stuck by it.

From A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

Bulgakov’s diary depicts for us more vividly than most of the accounts the underlying tension of day-to-day life at [the Tolstoys’ home] Yasnaya Polyana. At meals, the master of the house and the mistress were already bickering, or eyeing each other with suspicion. Tolstoy complained ceaselessly about the “elaborate” diet. Sofya Andreyevna [Tolstoy] justified it “on the grounds that a vegetarian table needs variety.” Tolstoy took to elaborate sotto voce apologies to guests which were designed to get a “rise” out of his increasingly hysterical wife.

When the painter N. N. Ge came to a meal, Tolstoy whispered, “I think that in fifty years people will say: ‘Imagine, they could calmly sit there and eat while grown people walked around waiting on them—their food was served to them, cooked for them.’”

“What are you talking about?” asked Sofya Andreyevna. “About their serving us?”

“Yes,” said Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy] and repeated aloud what he had said.

Sofya Andreyevna began to protest.

“But I was only saying it to him,” said Lev Nikolayevich, pointing to Ge. “I knew there would be objections and I absolutely do not wish to argue.”

2 Timothy 4:7

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.

Conversations and anecdotes

From River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard (2005)

He was, [Colonel] Rondon wrote, “the life of the party.” In contrast to the reserved, taciturn Brazilian colonel, Roosevelt must have seemed peculiarly fun and lighthearted. Rondon himself was stunned by his loquacious co-commander. “And talk!” he wrote, “I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects.”

From Tolstoy: A Biography, by A. N. Wilson (1988)

In society, shyness still tormented [the young Tolstoy] unless he was drunk. It is hard to think that the rules which he formulated for social behaviour necessarily made him the most charming of companions. “Rules for society. Choose difficult situations, always try to control a conversation, speak loudly, calmly and distinctly, try to being and end a conversation yourself. Seek the company of people higher in the world than yourself.”

From “The Evils of Spain,” by V. S. Pritchett , collected in Essential Stories (2005)

Caesar did not speak much. He gave his silent weight to the dinner, letting his head drop like someone falling asleep, and listening. To the noise we made his silence was a balance and he nodded all the time slowly, making everything true. Sometimes someone told some story about him and he listened to that, nodding and not disputing it.

From a review by Anthony Powell in the Daily Telegraph of John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England, by Maurice Pollett (1971). Collected in Some Poets, Artists, and ‘A Reference for Mellors’(2005).

Admitting that [John Skelton (c.1400-1529) had] a contemporary reputation for wit and eccentricity, we find also a mild anecdote about Skelton included during his own lifetime in one of those collections of jokes popular at the time, A Hundred Merry Tales. Shakespeare took some of his funny stories from this particular anthology.

So far so good, but hardly was Skelton in his coffin before further stories began to pour out about him, in which he was confused with a friend of Chaucer’s called Scoggin—also, as it happened, a poet and royal tutor—who had lived about a hundred years earlier.

That was bad enough, but worse was to come. Scoggin, as has been said, was an earlier personality, but one who, from his career, might be judged to possess a somewhat similar line of wit to Skelton’s. Unfortunately, on this already muddled situation descended an avalanche of chestnuts, many of a bawdy sort, told about another Scoggin, who almost certainly never existed, but was said to have been court fool to Henry VII.

Simply as regards confusion of identity, it was rather as if a story told about Evelyn Waugh was then said to refer to P. G. Wodehouse, and, as a result, not only were Waugh and Wodehouse anecdotes impossible to sort out, but they also could not be distinguished from those about Bertie Wooster, believed by many to be a real man.