William Heath On Womens Hats and Fashion Madness, Part I

by Stephen J. Gertz

Modern Oddities by P. Pry (W. Heath). Plate 1st.
The Sleeves Curiously Cut. June 30, 1829.

A singular collection of vividly colored, vividly satiric prints on Regency England fashions for women recently fell under my eyes and I nearly fell over.

The Beau Monde. July 6, 1829.

It was a spectacular compilation of hand-colored prints issued by the foremost English publisher of political and social satire, Thomas McLean, with outstanding compositions by William Heath  (fifty-two of fifty-nine) that lampoon London fashion, society, and characters in a manner that not only rivals his contemporary, Geo. Cruikshank, but, in the broad, burlesque exaggeration of the fashion plates, exceeds him, and, significantly, avoids the grotesquery that Cruikshank often wallows in; Heath  was clearly amused by his subjects, Cruikshank often harshly cynical.

The Fashion Behind But Not Behind the Fashion. May 1829.

William Heath (aka by pseudonym Paul Pry, 1794/5–1840), caricaturist and illustrator, was born in Northumbria. "Assuming that the particulars in his obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine are correct, Heath was only fourteen when his first satirical prints were published in 1809. Although he continued to etch occasional caricatures over the next fifteen years, he was principally occupied in illustrating books, mainly on military themes...

A Dessert Imitation of Modern Fashion. No date.

"When the demand for military prints declined in the 1820s Heath reverted to caricatures, published either as individual prints or as sets, and soon established himself in a leading position. In 1825–6 Heath was in Scotland, writing and illustrating the first magazine in the world to be given over, predominantly, to caricatures. The Glasgow Looking Glass...

Abroad Pt 1st. A La Mode 1829.

"Heath returned to London in 1827 and for the next two years was the leading caricaturist, prolific alike in social and political satire. In 1827 he started to sign his prints with a little drawing of the actor Liston in the role of Paul Pry, a character who interfered in other peoples' business in John Poole's eponymous comedy (1825). However the Paul Pry device attracted plagiarists on such a scale that in 1829, having complained on a caricature of a ‘dirty rogue’ who was ‘robbing us of our ideas and just profit', he abandoned it...

 Making a Lancer. No date.

"When on 1 January 1830 Thomas McLean, the leading purveyor of comic art, launched a monthly magazine of caricatures, available in plain and hand-coloured versions, called the Looking Glass, he advertised it as having been ‘drawn and etched’ by ‘William Heath’ for whom he acted as ‘sole Publisher’. Clearly Heath's name was the selling point, yet after seven issues he was replaced by Robert Seymour. Perhaps McLean felt that Seymour's lithographs better expressed the new spirit of delicacy to which he was attuning himself. Or perhaps he had become exasperated by Heath's ‘careless habits - drink, debts and unpunctuality’...In any event, after 1830 Heath's output of caricatures declined rapidly...The Gentleman's Magazine recorded that on 7 April 1840 ‘William Heath, artist’ died at ‘Hampstead, London, aged 45’" (Oxford DNB).

Opera Reminiscences Pl 2. Hat Boxes. July 14, 1829.

Here, McLean has gathered together unsold prints with a specially produced undated and generic title-page. While I cannot warrant it, this album appears to be a unique, McLean, presumably, using the title-page for ad hoc compilations as the need arose to move merchandise otherwise moribund.

The overwhelming majority of these prints appear under Heath's pseudonym, Paul Pry, identified by the tiny vignette device in the lower left (sometimes right) corner of each print, the figure often  commenting upon the content.

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[HEATH, William, R. Seymour, R. Cruikshank, M. Egerton,  A Selection of Humorous Engravings, Caricatures &c. by Various Artists, Selected and Arranged by Thomas McLean. London: Thomas McLean, n.d. [1827-29].

Folio (19 1/4 x 14 in; 488 x353 mm). Engraved title page, and fifty-nine hand-colored engraved plates each window-pane mounted on heavy stock. Fifty-one are by William Heath; three are by Robert Seymour (two of which are signed "Shortshanks"); one by Michael Egerton (M.E.); one by Robert Cruikshank; and three are unsigned.

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More in Part II.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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A Scarce Libation: Bacchus, Rumfusticus Bibulus, and R. Cruikshank

by Stephen J. Gertz

Meeting of Victuallers.

 "The Publicans, as well as every other branch of the community, were aware that recent improvements in modern science had effected a Rail Road from this Earth to the Moon, in which part of the Isle of Sky Bacchus has an airy summer residence; they therefore resolved to send up by the new Steam Coach, one of the Victualler Chiefs, to invite their jovial Patron down to head their forces, and to fight their battles with their foes, The Tee-Totallers" (from the Introduction).

Steam Coachman To The Moon.

This very amusing, curious little satire is comprised of six anti-temperance drinking-songs each with an accompanying hand-colored aquatint plate by Robert Cruikshank. It appeared when the temperance movement in England began in earnest, an effort that was "a major cause for social reform  in Victorian Britain" (Rebecca Smith. The Temperance Movement and Class Struggle in  Victorian England. Loyola University).   At the time of its publication in 1841 Robert Cruikshank, who shared a "deep fraternal bond" (Patten, p. 216) with his celebrated brother, George, was already deteriorating from alcoholism. 

Bacchus At Home.

George, in the same year, contributed the etchings to John O'Niell's poem,  The Drunkard. Though not yet a committed tee-totaller, his faith in drink was shaken (not stirred), and in 1847 he committed himself to the cause of abstinence with his grim moral tale in caricature, The Bottle.

Meeting Of Tee-Totallers.

In the next year, 1848, George Cruikshank, now a temperance zealot,  produced a sequel in eight plates, The Drunkard's Children. Robert remained firmly on the side of anti-temperance.

Commencement Of Hostilities.

Regarding Robert Cruikshank, George "could not cow his brother into signing a pledge; Robert lapsed deeper and deeper into chronic alcoholism" (Patten, p. 315). He died in 1856.

Departure Of The Victualler Chief For The Combat.

The original binding for Bacchus and the Tee-Totallers was executed by Robert Riviere in green cloth with a blindstamped frame and large corner-pieces enclosing a gilt vignette by Robert Cruikshank loosely reproducing his plate, Steam Coachman to the Moon. 

"Riviere was the top of the line and this small satirical volume must have had an important backer to finance a custom Riviere binding and six aquatinted plates by Cruikshank" (Princeton University, Graphic Arts).

An important backer who did not wish to see his libations become as scarce as this book has become, a committed anti-temperance man of means.

Only one copy has come to auction since 1968. OCLC/KVK record only eight copies in institutional collections worldwide, with none, curiously, in the U.K. The Widener copy at Harvard is  partially uncolored, and two institutional copies have been rebound.

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[CRUIKSHANK, Robert]. Bacchus and the Tee-Totallers by Rumfusticus Bibulus, Esq., President of the Anti-Temperance Society. London: Sherwood, Gilbert, And Piper, 1841.

First edition. Octavo (8 1/2 x 7 1/8 in; 218 x 178 mm). 19. {1, blank] pp. Six hand-colored aquatint plates with later tissue guards loosely inserted. 

Original binding by Robert Riviere (per Princeton & Yale Universities) in green cloth with blindstamped frame and large corner-pieces enclosing a gilt vignette loosely reproducing the plate, Steam Coachman to the Moon.

Widener Collection, p. 235. Not in Abbey, Tooley, or Prideaux.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Robert Cruikshank Devastates Dandies.
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The Artistic Roots of Modern Typography

by Alastair Johnston

Matthew McLennan Young The Rise and Fall of the Printers' International Specimen Exchange.

Oak Knoll Press $59.95

Not all books have a plot, or a beginning and an end. I am not referring to Artists' books or directories, but rather sample books, like catalogues or salesman's specimens. And all periodicals have a trajectory: they are born, boom, and then decline and die. The Printers' International Specimen Exchange, which ran from 1880 to 1896, is a scarce work today, but it is very important in the history of graphic design.

Contribution to Volume X, 1889, by J. Silsbury, Isle of Wight, including imported typefaces Washington & Karnak

The Printers' International Specimen Exchange demonstrates how an ephemeral publication can have a major impact on aesthetics and the quality of work. It also documents the growth of a movement known as "Artistic Printing" in the USA and "Leicester Freestyle" in England that ultimately gave birth to modernist typography, as seen in the work of Oscar Wilde, J. M. Whistler, and then in the twentieth century, in practitioners like Jan Tschichold, Karel Teige and Jack Stauffacher.

  

The idea germinated in Andrew Tuer's magazine, The Paper & Printing Trades Journal, that if 100 printers sent 100 copies of their best ephemeral work, the results could be bound and returned to the participants. It caught on immediately. With Tuer's sometimes droll editorial comments on the work there was a marked improvement in the trade, and British printers soon caught up to the remarkable color work and rule bending going on in Cincinnati and Poughkeepsie.

  

Contribution to volume IV by W.H. Bartholomew & Bro., New York, including Aesthetic & Gothic Condensed types

"Wrinkler" work by J. Richardson of Earhart & Richardson, Cincinnati

At his Leadenhall Press in London, Tuer wrote and published antiquarian compilations of children's literature and original books such as Luxurious Bathing, The History of the Horn-Book, London Cries, and The Kaukneigh Awlminek (where he coined the phrase "English as she is spoke"). For the latter, however, he was taken to task by his friend George Augustus Sala (prolific scrivener and likely co-author of the flagellation novel The Mysteries of Verbena House), for questioning Dickens' use of the Cockney idiom. Tuer thought Dickens orthography was obsolete (G. B. Shaw agreed); Sala, himself a Cockney, would hear of no such thing. Andrew Tuer was a tireless correspondent, writing letters to the Times, Notes & Queries, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Athenaeum; he was an intimate of the Punch circle of artists and writers, men like George du Maurier and Phil May, and through his magazine he communicated with the leading printers of the day. At the time America was the home of innovation, and the ephemeral jobwork of American presses was truly beautiful; today we can see this work was inspired by Japanese prints (that according to some accounts came as wrapping paper on ceramics after the opening of Yokohama to the West in the 1850s).

"Artistic" typography by John Southall of Newport, UK

By sharing their work with printers in England, Germany and elsewhere, the Americans transformed the look of print graphics in the West. Even printers in Burma, China and Ceylon contributed to the anthology and printers from 28 countries were represented in the run of the Specimen Exchange.

Incredible letterpress color work from Raithby & Lawrence of Leicester, including "Chaos-type," invented by John Earhart of Cincinnati, used for the background

Matthew Young's new book showcases over 80 specimens (full size and in color; n.b. those shown here are from the Poltroon Press collection and not the illustrations from the book), and gives a detailed account of the behind-the-scenes machinations that affected the course of this publication: How the Specimen Exchange was wrested from the amiable Tuer by his sub-editor Robert Hilton and taken to Raithby & Lawrence, and how Hilton managed to alienate the Germans and others and run the publication into the ground in a few years.)

Tightly registered color work from Carl Fromm, Vienna. The Germans quit the Specimen Exchange after Hilton insulted them.

What Young does not discuss is how the cadenced layout eventually gave rise to asymmetric typography. One asset of the internet is the ease with which I can demonstrate this. Here's a submission from P. Lamont, the machine-foreman with the Darien Press of Edinburgh, found in volume IX of the PISE. (The whole volume can be browsed on line here.)

If we remove the decorative material and leave only the type we get this:

See how the compositor has balanced the page by centering the top four lines. Then "Garments" is set off (perhaps that should read "Garments are cast off") to the right and counteracted by the weight of the imprint which is staggered to the left. There's a confident new approach to spatial arrangement at work here, and we see it in the typography of contemporary books as well.

Here you can see the effect in the 1882 edition of Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf by Rennell Rodd, printed by Joseph M. Stoddart of Philadelphia, with typography suggested by Oscar Wilde who arranged for its publication.

Wilde's arch-rival John McNeill, famed son of "Whistler's Mother," also used asymmetry, though a bit more awkwardly, in his books.

[Aside: the scanning mice on Internet Archive have gone out of their way to screw up the appearance of these works: pages off the scanner, borders not aligned, no sense of the margins [see above] and worst of all they even get even-numbered pages on the recto from time to time. Come on Brewster, shake up those slacking minions!]

By 1893 the new visual syntax was widely accepted in publishing. Here's a nice example of a charming story by Joseph Ashby-Sterry (note that this copy was inscribed to G. A. Sala), found in the CAL stacks. The central axis has been shifted to the left. Go back a page and look at the half title, which is also asymmetric.

Now consider Alfred Jarry's first book, Minutes of Memorial Sand, from the following year, clearly a forerunner of Iliazd and the Russians of the Revolutionary period.

It's not too big a jump to the "Modern Typography" espoused by Frederic Ehrlich and others and the myriad examples he gives of how it's done. From there it spreads out into the mainstream. But to get back on course, if you are interested in the history of graphic design, Matthew Young's new book is a wonderful account of a lesser-known part of the story. It's handsome and lucidly presented and worth your time and attention.

Meet John Guttemberg, Printer

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1657, London stationer William Lee issued the fifth (sixth) edition of Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives. of the Noble Greeks and Romans. In addition to the usual suspects, Lee added twenty biographies of people Plutarch never wrote a word about, including (in translations mostly by the playwright George Gerbier d’Ouvilly) Aristotle, Homer, Sappho, Charlemagne, Tamburlaine, Atabalipa King of Peru, and Johann Gutenberg, with a two-page paean celebrating his life and "the Excellency of the Art of Printing."

"Amongst the rarest and laudablest Inventions which were derived by the Ingenuity of man, we must needs confess, The Art of Printing may at present justly claim the best and highest esteem; whereby all the other Arts and Sciences are so plainly and accurately rendered unto us; and whereby two men, in one day, may dispatch and Print off more Books then several men could before have written in a whole year. This Art (as it is generally believed) was first invented in Moguntia, or Mentz, a City in Germany, in the year of our Lord one thousand four hundred forty and two, by John Guttemberg, a German Knight from honorable Family; who first of all did there make the experiment of the said Art, so did also make the first trial of that Ink which to this very day is used by the Printers: Although some other Writers do affirm that John Faustus, and Yves Shefey, two years before invented this said Art, and so gave them praise of it; And only say that this John Guttemberg, John Mantel, John Pres, Adolph Rusch, Peter Shesser, Martin Flache, Uldric Hen, John Froben, Adam Peter, Thomas Wolff, and others did all at once very much perfect this said Art of Printing, which they did spread throughout all Germany and the adjacent Countries. And indeed Conradus did use this Art at Rome, in the year fourteen hundred. In the beginning of which Profession on the grounds of it were known but to a very few persons; for at such times as they had any thing to Set, they brought their Characters with them in bags, and when they had done, they carried them back again. And in those daies, both the Printers, and such as did make the Letter-Moulds, were in great repute, wealthy and opulent, and reverenced as Noble personages, making a vast profit by the said Art.  But at present, by reason of the infinite multitude of Books which are printed, and that all men are permitted to profess that Science, although they have never so little insight in it; it so fals out, that both the composers and Printers, reap thereby neither profit no praise, but only imply their labour and time to the benefit of the Publick, with a very little profit or Thanks to themselves…"  

Encouraged "to venture upon a new and fifth impression,"  Lee, desirous to render it "both acceptable to the present Age, and famous to Posterity,"  added  the "quintessence" of André Thevet’s Pourtraits et vies des Hommes illustres Grecz, Latin, et Payens (Paris, 1584), as they were "the very marrow of his observations during his twenty three yeers travails and Peregrinations, throughout the chiefest and remotest parts in the world … (never as yet extant nor seen in English)."

Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, first appearing in 1579 and immediately celebrated, was a major resource for Shakespeare, providing the background material for Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus. More than that, however,  North's "long passages of … magnificent prose" were so impressive that Shakespeare rendered them "into blank verse with little change" (F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion). Halliwell-Phillipps asserts of North's translation that “it is one of the books that can positively be said to have been in [Shakespeare's] own hands.”

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PLUTARCH.  The Lives of the noble Grecians & Romans, compared together by that grave learned Philosopher & Historiographer Plutarch of Chæronea. Translated out of Greek into French by James Amiot … With the Lives of Hannibal & Scipio African; translated out of Latin into French, by Charles del’Escluse, and out of French into English by Sir Thomas North, Knight. Hereunto are added the Lives of Epaminondas, of Philip of Macedon, of Dionysius the Elder, Tyrant of Sicilia, of Augustus Cæsar, of Plutarch, and of Seneca: with the Lives of nine other excellent Chieftains of Warre: collected out of Æmylius Probus, by S. G. S. and Englished by the aforesaid Translator. And now also in this Edition are further added, the Lives of twenty selected eminent Persons, of ancient and latter Times; translated out of the Work of that famous Historiographer to the King of France and Poland, Andrew Thevet …   London, Printed by Abraham Miller, and are to be sold by William Lee … 1657.

Folio, mostly in sixes, pp. [16], 443, 446-1031, [27], 76, [34], with an engraved title, dated 1656, designed by Francis Barlow, and integral engraved portrait vignettes.  Title printed in red and black. Separate title pages for ‘The Lives of Epaminondas [etc.]’, dated 1656, and for ‘Prosopographia: or some select Pourtraitures and Lives … by Andrew Thevet’, dated 1657 (mistakenly bound before the ‘Notes and Explanations’ at 3T1); with an advertisement leaf and thirty-four pages of index.

Wing P 2633.
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Image courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, currently offering this title, with our thanks.

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A Leopard Gave Its Life For This Binding

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

Sometime between 1828 and 1832, a copy of One Hundred Fables, Original and Selected by James Northcote (1828) was bound with leopard skin panels. This is that copy.

Bound unsigned in contemporary deep oxblood goatskin, it possesses a gilt and blindstamped frame that encloses leopard skin panels to both sides. The spine is decorated with gilt strapwork  with the publication date in gilt at its tail. Broad turn-ins  with multiple gilt fillets, thick and thin, and gilt corner ornaments grace the inside covers. All edges are gilt. The bookplate of F. Hornsby Wright is mounted to the front free-endpaper. The neat signature of his ancestor, Joseph Wright, the original owner of this  large-paper copy, is found in the upper right corner of the title page.

An autograph note initialed by F. Hornsby Wright  (director of Arnot and Harrison, an engineering and toolmaking company that worked in British aeronautics and automobile manufacture during the early decades of the twentieth century) and tipped-in to the front paste-down endpaper reads: 

"Joseph Wright 1769-1836 while quartered at Tower of London a leopard which was kept there died and part of its skin was used to bind this book." 

Joseph Wright was quartered in the Tower as part of its military guard; he was not a prisoner. on the way to losing his limbs. By the 19th century the Tower was no longer employed as a splendid jail, never its primary purpose, and its reputation as a torture chamber is highly exaggerated, more legend than fact..

No, if you were high-born and headed for the chopping-block you were sent up the block to Tower Hill, the better to be beheaded in the presence of a crowd.

Tower of London seen from across the river Thames.

Founded in 1066 by William the Conqueror, by 1210, Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, commonly known as the Tower of London, housed the Royal Menagerie established by King John. 

"For over 600 years, animals were kept at the Tower for the entertainment and curiosity of the court. Everything from elephants to tigers, kangaroos and ostriches lived in what was known as the Royal Menagerie. Under James I, the bloody sport of baiting became very popular and a platform was built over the dens so that the King and his courtiers could watch lions, bears and dogs being made to fight each other to the death.

"In later years, the variety of animals at the Tower increased and the Menagerie became a popular attraction. At the Royal Menagerie, visitors could see strange and rare beasts that they would never have seen before. The Menagerie finally closed after several incidents where the animals had escaped and attacked each other, visitors and Tower staff. The Duke of Wellington, who was Constable of the Tower [1826-1852], ordered the animals to leave and in 1832 they arrived at their new home in London Zoo" (Historic Royal Places - Tower of London).

In short, the 280 residents of the Royal Menagerie, representing over sixty species, met their Waterloo by the man who introduced Napoleon to his. Exile to the new London Zoo at Regent Park was, however, a far better fate than Napoleon's at St. Helena. 

The Royal Menagerie had been opened to the public during the eighteenth century; admission was three half-pence. If you didn't have the cash, a dog or cat was accepted as legal tender,  employed as tender vittles for the lions. I can't help but think that Nappy would have made an impressive, exotic caged exhibit attracting throngs had he been sent to the menagerie instead of a remote island.  The cost of Napoleon's upkeep could have easily been covered with profit and had he escaped he would not have gotten far before being re-captured, dethroned French emperors a conspicuous sight in London.

The author of One Hundred Fables, James Northcote (1736-1831), was a renowned British painter and a member of the Royal Academy who also sought fame as an writer. His Fables, the first series published in 1828, the second posthumously in 1833, were illustrated with woodcuts by William Harvey (1796-1866) from Northcote's own designs.

"The original invention and designs for the prints at the head of each fable are my own, yet they have been most excellently drawn on wood and prepared for the engravers by Mr. William Harvey ... the ornamental letter at the beginning of each fable and the vignette at the end are solely the invention of Mr. Harvey" (from the Preface).

Most of the animals in the Royal Menagerie, particularly the large ones, were given names by the staff but, alas, most of their names have been lost to history. In 1829 the Royal Menagerie was home to three leopards, one of whom became immortalized in this binding, cause of death unknown to me.

Martyred in the cause of the book arts, Booktryst will call this anonymous panthera pardus Il Gattopardo, in homage to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's magnificent novel (1958) about a noble Sicilian big-cat who must adapt to the encroachment of Garibaldi's Red Shhrts upon his territory and adjust to a new order.

First edition.

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[BINDING, Exotic Animal Skin]. NORTHCOTE, James. [HARVEY, William, engraver]. One Hundred Fables, Original and Selected by James Northcote, R.A. Embellished with Two Hundred and Eighty Engravings on Wood. London: Geo. Lawford, 1828.

First edition, a large-paper copy. Quarto (10 1/8 x 5 7/8 in; 257 x 149 mm). [2], iii, [1, blank], 272 pp. Title page in black and red with woodcut vignette. 280 wood engravings as head- and tail-pieces and historiated initials. With the bookplate of F. Hornby Wright and his initialed autograph note mounted to front endpapers.

Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914, 55.

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Images of One Hundred Fables courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Mr. Bunting in Paradise

by Alastair Johnston

Bunting's Persia. Translations by Basil Bunting. Edited by Don Share. Flood Editions, 2012.

Ask your distant cousins out there in Middle America what they fear most and they will tell you "Muslims." Ask them to explain the difference between Muslims and, say, Mormons, and they will hesitate, but you, dear enlightened reader of Booktryst, will know the answer, won't you? Within Islam there are sects that are as different as Unitarians and Anglicans or Copts and Catholics.

A Muslim sect that has a broad appeal in the West is Sufism. Sufis are poets and philosophers: Hell, some are even into the odd alcoholic beverage. Nevertheless it may come as a surprise that the best-selling poet in America today, with over a quarter of a million copies in print, is a Persian Sufi poet named Rumi.

The truth is, the Sufis are fun and very easy to love. As Manuchehri says,

   We, men of wine are we, meat are we, music...
   Well, then! Wine we have, meat we have, music...

Bunting's Persia is a delight for a number of reasons. Not least the wonderful Sufi poetry it contains, but also because it is another volume by an under-appreciated poet of the twentieth century, Basil Bunting (1900-85), whose Collected Poems (Fulcrum, 1965, reprinted by Oxford University Press in 1978) is anorexically thin. Bunting didn't write a lot, in fact he took a 15-year break from writing, working as the financial editor of a newspaper until a young poet, Tom Pickard, tracked him down and persuaded him to get back to verse. The result was Briggflatts (1966) which Cyril Connolly (writing in the London Times) hailed as the best poetry book since Eliot's Four Quartets.

Bunting in Rapallo, 1930

Like Eliot, Bunting was under the Modernist influence of Ezra Pound and hung out with him and W.B. Yeats in Rapallo in the 1930s. He had known Shaw and Lawrence in London; in Paris he worked with Ford Madox Ford and got drunk with Hemingway. His first book was published in Milan in 1930, his second in Galveston in 1950.

But what's the Persian link? Bunting found a ratty copy of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh translated into French and decided (with Pound's urging) he needed to read the original, so with the help of a dictionary he taught himself classical Farsi. This came in handy when World War II broke out. Bunting had spent the First World War in jail in England as a Conscientious Objector (he was a Quaker), and decided this time around to enlist in the Royal Air Force. As an interpreter (despite the lack of similarity between classical and modern Persian) he was sent to Isfahan. After the war he became Vice Consul in the British Embassy.

He married a Persian girl and became foreign correspondent for the Times of London. He absorbed the culture through his pores and told anecdotes like the one about three men who went out of the city on Friday night to enjoy themselves in their own ways. When they returned the gates were locked. The drunkard said, "Let's batter down the door!" The man who smoked hashish said, "No, let's crawl through the keyhole," but the man who smoked opium said, "No, let's lie down here 'til daybreak."

He continued (in this interview printed in a little magazine in the 1960s) by telling the story of the time he and a couple of friends — one of them happened to be the Head of the Persian Secret Police, unaware that Bunting was actually a British spy masquerading as a reporter — were smoking opium round the stove in his living-room when the stove went out. Now in Persia the usual way to light a stove is to pour paraffin over it and light the paraffin. But the coals were still hot, and so when paraffin was added the stove exploded. Bits of the stove flew across the room, almost decapitating his friend, and the drapes caught fire. The friends sat there laughing hysterically as the servants rushed in and put the flames out.

This life in Paradise ended when he was expelled by Mossadeq. An angry mob arrived at his house to get him. No one noticed when he snuck out the back way and chanted "Death to Mr Bunting" with them.

Bunting's Collected Poems is a scant 150 pages long so a new book from his hand is a delight to be savored and dipped into like a box of fresh dates.

A couple of the pieces did appear in the Collected (as the wittily named "Overdrafts"), but here they are handsomely presented (the Fulcrum book is particularly ungainly) and, besides, it's important to gather all the fragments of Bunting's Persian together as someone else might gather his Latin translations, if more turn up. Though Bunting's archive is at the  University of Durham, England, these pieces ended up in Texas. While few Americans are qualified to comment on Persian poetry in translation, there is enough understanding of the tradition to know whether these versions are valid. So what is Mr Bunting's message from beyond? Youth is fleeting, life is short, seize the day:

"Many a broken desert has been gay garden," says Rudaki. And, from the same poet,

   What can you know, my blackhaired beauty,
   what I was like in the old days?
   You tickle your lover with your curls
   but never knew the time when he had curls.

The centerpiece is a long work by Ferdowsi called "The Beginning of the Stories," and its sequel "Faridun's Sons," which is really the prelude to an epic (the work Bunting had found on the bookiniste stall that started him on this lifelong adventure), but enough of a taste to engage us. It bears a striking resemblance to King Lear: an old king divides his empire among three sons and the elder two plot against the younger. It's a bloody tale but has a pacifist message:

   Don't injure even an ant,
   it has life, life is sweet.

There is a telegraphic compression where we sense the lesson of Ez keeping Baz on track:

   A long time, Fate keeping her face veiled.
   Faridun grew old, dust drifted over the garden,
   a changed conversation, strength turned weakness by age,
   and the nobles huffed when any business was muffed.

He teases us with several short untitled poems by Manuchehri. See this lovely description of riding in the desert, away from one's loved one:

   Wind froze my blood, the pools frozen
   like silver dishes on a gold tray.

   Before morning night was blacker
   for the white snow wasting away
   and out of the hard ground rose a mud like fishglue.

The notes by Don Share fill us in on the poets, with quotes from Bunting's letters and writings: "You want the directness of some Catullus? Go to Manuchehri. You want the swiftness of Anacreon? Manuchehri.  The elaborate music of Spenser? Go to Manuchehri. ... Satire, direct and overwhelming, Manuchehri all alone — no competitor."

Sa'di pours his heart out in aching love poems, but manages to work in

   Many well-known people have been packed away in cemeteries
   there is no longer any evidence that they ever existed.

Perhaps the best-known of these poets is Hafiz (1315-90) who advises us

    If you
   want eternity do so
   they'll never use past tense of you.
   Drink as Hafiz, you'll gather impetus
   world without end.

Many have interpreted the Sufis' thirst for alcohol as an allegory of mysticism: Bunting doubts this, dismissing Robert Bly and Ralph Waldo Emerson's interpretations. Sometimes a bottle of wine is just that:

   I'm the worse for drink again, it's
   got the better of me.
   A thousand thanks to the red wine
   put colour in my face.
   I'll kiss the hand that gathered the grapes.
   May he never trudge who trod them out!

The collection ends with "The Pious Cat" a children's story by Zakani that was previously published in a limited edition by Bertram Rota (200 copies printed at the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona), in 1986.

Now that he is among the immortals, Bunting can invite us to journey back to the 11th century with him:

   Bid them come and see our noble century
   and read our poetry and despair —

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D-I-V-O-R-C-E or, John Milton on Splitsville

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1643, poet John Milton, who later wrote Paradise Lost, anonymously published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the first of four tracts he wrote 1643-1645 in support of divorce against Canon law, which he believed was contrary to the true meaning of Scripture and the Gospel. If a marriage was not working it was to the good of both sexes for it to be dissolved. His argument was that unsuitable unions of couples ‘chained unnaturally together’ should be broken on the grounds of incompatibility, a radical idea in its time. It shocked his contemporaries.

Divorce in 17th century England was against the law. You married for life, a holy bond that only God could break by calling one of the parties home. If the union was contentious it was a marriage to the death.

Milton had a stake in the issue.  In 1642, at age thirty-three, he married  a seventeen year old girl, Mary Powell. She soon deserted him to return to her parents. Divorce was impossible, divorce and remarriage doubly so. You could legally separate but never dissolve the union. The only out was a church annulment but that involved admitting that the marriage was never consummated,  the husband was impotent, or the wife frigid, each a major public embarrassment. He argued that neither ecclesiastic or civil powers held authority in matters of marriage and divorce; it was a a strictly private affair.

John Milton.

But only for the man. Milton had no interest in granting women the power to divorce their husbands. Yet his definition of marriage as something more than a union for procreation (or remedy against fornication) was wholly modern if one-sided: "the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evils of solitary life."

An unhappy couple, "mistak’n in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure"  was doomed to a "spight of antipathy to fadge together, and combine as they may to their unspeakable wearisomnes and despaire of all sociable delight." This violated  his belief in marriage as mutual companionship.

The 1643 first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce sold out almost immediately; controversy then and now tends to promote sales. Attempts were made to ban the tract.  A second edition was issued in 1644, greatly enlarged by almost half and including a new Preface "To the Parliament of England with the Assembly." Two more editions appeared in 1645, reprints of the 1644 issue, one with an errata page, the other, possibly unauthorized, without one. The other three of Milton's Divorce tracts are The Judgment of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion. John Milton's model for the ideal marriage is manifest in the relationship between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (1667).

Gustave Doré, Adam and Eve in the Garden, Paradise Lost (1866).

In 1964, as the first kid on my block to come from what was then still quaintly called a "broken home," I was in the vanguard, a young, lone pioneer on the  frontier when the Greatest Generation decided things weren't so great and made a strategic retreat from the domestic battlefield to a separate peace. It was in the next year, 1965, that the divorce rate in the U.S. began its march toward doubling by 1975; I was an anxious point-man on recon before hostilities broke-out on a large scale.

Holy matrimony, Batman! In those days,  New York State, as so many others, made divorce a legal ordeal as wrenching as its emotional anguish. But there was an exotic, legit alternative. You could visit  pre-drug cartel Juarez in sunny Mexico, hang around for a few hours, have lunch. see the sights, pay a nominal court fee, and be granted a that's-all-there-is-to-it divorcio al vapor - evaporated nuptials. 

My mother was necessarily one such divorce tourist. I'm not sure whether it occurred during Mexico's Dia de los Muertos holiday but afterward my parents' marriage was officially dead and no one was celebrating except me. Consumed with guilt for bearing such a betraying sentiment (and for so much more), I  beat myself up like a human piñata for years afterward. And, in what became a family tradition, my own marriage ended in divorce, as did my sister's. For me, divorce was a rite of passage ceremony, an adult bar mizvah for the damned. When I walked out the door I dropped off a cliff.

Now, everybody's doing it; so what else is new? But forty-eight years ago my sister and I earned purple hearts for injuries incurred in the cross-fire, wounds that, for me, never bled until much later when the  effects of my parents' divorce finally spilled. When the  school psychologist - who I was sent to because I was truant for nearly three months straight - asked how I thought my parents' split affected me, I insouciantly replied, "not at all," the response of a kid who'd battened-down the hatches and hunkered-in until the storm passed but it never did.

As crippling as its aftermath was had my parents not split-up my outcome would have been so much worse before it got so much better. It might not have gotten better at all. I'm thankful to John Milton for his efforts at reformation.

In 1968, country-western diva Tammy Wynette spelled out what was still the broken love that dare not speak its name, below introduced by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, a married couple that only a six-shooter could separate but was never drawn and fired for the sake of their child, Trigger, who they stuffed as a keepsake after his death.

And now, as God said in Paradise Lost when He expelled Adam and Eve from  Eden, "Happy Trails!"*


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M[ILTON], J[ohn].  The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; restor'd to the good of both SEXES, from the bondage of CANON LAW, and other mistakes, to the true meaning of Scripture in the LAW and GOSPEL compar'd: wherein also are set down the bad consequences of abolishing or condemning of Sin, that which the law of God allowes, and Christ abolisht not: now the second time revis'd and much augmented in two books: to the Parliament of England with the Assembly. London: Imprinted in the Year 1645.

Forth edition. Small quarto. [8], 72 pp, with the usual mispagination to pp. 69-78 in sheet G. Lackng errata.

Wing M2110. Coleridge, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Milton Collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library 17. Parker, Milton: A Biography, pp. 890-891.

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* Paradise Lost by John Milton. Newly Revised for a Popular Audience by T. Basil Leeves. Frostbite Falls: Wottsamatta U Press, 1989.
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Image of 1645 edition courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, currently offering this title, with our thanks.

Image of 1643 first edition courtesy of Rutgers University, with our appreciation.

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