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How can there be a book no man can read?
I was recently discussing Greer Gilman's Moonwise (1991) and Cloud & Ashes (2009), which set me listening to Anne Lister's "Beech and Willow," and now I am trying to decide whether to re-read Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout (1966) where I first encountered the riddle-song refrain of perry merry dixi, dominee. The impediment is that the book drives me up the wall.
It is not a bad book in most of the usual senses; it just collapses so completely in the last chapter that it's difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't willing to be disappointed. Until then, I love quite a few things about it, including its trickster, its fenlands, its brother and sister caught up in the midsummer mystery, and its illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Redheaded, down-to-earth Sandy is associated with the sun; black-haired, second-sighted Sally with the moon; and Pout himself is likened to the wind, swinging constantly around its unpredictable compass. He's a great trickster. We never get much of an official description of him beyond his gestures and expressions, but Hyman draws him as a monastic little figure whose face is never really seen; his moods are mercurial, his conceit enormous, and his greatest triumph the freezing night of February 12, 1322 when he engineered the fall of the central tower of Ely Cathedral. He's reckoned the years since then in the calendar P.P.T.: "Post Pouti Triumphum, of course!" It was his revenge for being bound to the cathedral eight hundred years ago, from which he explains his sole chance of freedom lies in finding the elusive Green Hellebore—Helleborus viridis, as he's so fond of deploying schoolmasterly Latin into otherwise unsuspecting conversations—though sometimes he claims to be searching for the spell-breaking plant for the sake of Cerberus, who wandered centuries ago out of Greek myth, through the legend of Edmund the Martyr, and into an equally mystifying fate. He swears in explosive alliterations like "Shirt-studs and shibboleths!" or "Spitfires and spatchcocks!" and his temper can be frightening, but he deflates so forlornly at a warning word from Sally that it's impossible for either sibling to hold a grudge against him, especially when he can also be whimsical and kind. He plunders saints' reliquaries for soup bones and is overjoyed to be introduced to chocolate. Probably the book's worst failing is that it tries to explain him when he doesn't need to be anything but himself. Its second-worst failing is that it tries to explain its own plot. Right up through the finale, the narrative runs on the kind of dream logic that is always on the verge of turning into nightmare, as if some greater pattern is moving underneath the surface of medieval songs and herbal lore and too-close-for-chance encounters with a relentlessly garrulous professor whose eccentricity seems comic and sinister by turns; it's funny and shivery and occasionally touches on the real, numinous strangeness of history and time and then it all falls in on itself like the fourteenth-century tower of Ely with a near-monologue of a wrap-up that answers a lot of questions the reader wasn't asking and leaves all the shadowy, suggestive substance of the book unaddressed and I can't even see it as a deliberate effect, it's so undercutting. It feels as though the author was writing by the seat of his unconscious and at the last minute made the mistake of trying to think about it. Any trickster could have told him you can stand on air forever so long as you don't look down.
Decades after reading the book for the first time, I discovered it was the first and only work of fiction by a noted medievalist. I am guessing that it evolved out of the history of the tower's fall and also perhaps a couple of local gargoyles mentioned in the text; it has obvious antecedents in Kipling and Nesbit and obvious age-mates in Cooper and Garner and I just wish it was as strong as any of them. The author was later married to Pauline Clarke. Maybe they should have collaborated. I remember her knowing how to end a story.
In any case, my day majority-sucked, but we had waffles in the evening and complaining analytically about this book seems to have cheered me up. My plan for the rest of the evening is, sadly, capitalism.
It is not a bad book in most of the usual senses; it just collapses so completely in the last chapter that it's difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't willing to be disappointed. Until then, I love quite a few things about it, including its trickster, its fenlands, its brother and sister caught up in the midsummer mystery, and its illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Redheaded, down-to-earth Sandy is associated with the sun; black-haired, second-sighted Sally with the moon; and Pout himself is likened to the wind, swinging constantly around its unpredictable compass. He's a great trickster. We never get much of an official description of him beyond his gestures and expressions, but Hyman draws him as a monastic little figure whose face is never really seen; his moods are mercurial, his conceit enormous, and his greatest triumph the freezing night of February 12, 1322 when he engineered the fall of the central tower of Ely Cathedral. He's reckoned the years since then in the calendar P.P.T.: "Post Pouti Triumphum, of course!" It was his revenge for being bound to the cathedral eight hundred years ago, from which he explains his sole chance of freedom lies in finding the elusive Green Hellebore—Helleborus viridis, as he's so fond of deploying schoolmasterly Latin into otherwise unsuspecting conversations—though sometimes he claims to be searching for the spell-breaking plant for the sake of Cerberus, who wandered centuries ago out of Greek myth, through the legend of Edmund the Martyr, and into an equally mystifying fate. He swears in explosive alliterations like "Shirt-studs and shibboleths!" or "Spitfires and spatchcocks!" and his temper can be frightening, but he deflates so forlornly at a warning word from Sally that it's impossible for either sibling to hold a grudge against him, especially when he can also be whimsical and kind. He plunders saints' reliquaries for soup bones and is overjoyed to be introduced to chocolate. Probably the book's worst failing is that it tries to explain him when he doesn't need to be anything but himself. Its second-worst failing is that it tries to explain its own plot. Right up through the finale, the narrative runs on the kind of dream logic that is always on the verge of turning into nightmare, as if some greater pattern is moving underneath the surface of medieval songs and herbal lore and too-close-for-chance encounters with a relentlessly garrulous professor whose eccentricity seems comic and sinister by turns; it's funny and shivery and occasionally touches on the real, numinous strangeness of history and time and then it all falls in on itself like the fourteenth-century tower of Ely with a near-monologue of a wrap-up that answers a lot of questions the reader wasn't asking and leaves all the shadowy, suggestive substance of the book unaddressed and I can't even see it as a deliberate effect, it's so undercutting. It feels as though the author was writing by the seat of his unconscious and at the last minute made the mistake of trying to think about it. Any trickster could have told him you can stand on air forever so long as you don't look down.
Decades after reading the book for the first time, I discovered it was the first and only work of fiction by a noted medievalist. I am guessing that it evolved out of the history of the tower's fall and also perhaps a couple of local gargoyles mentioned in the text; it has obvious antecedents in Kipling and Nesbit and obvious age-mates in Cooper and Garner and I just wish it was as strong as any of them. The author was later married to Pauline Clarke. Maybe they should have collaborated. I remember her knowing how to end a story.
In any case, my day majority-sucked, but we had waffles in the evening and complaining analytically about this book seems to have cheered me up. My plan for the rest of the evening is, sadly, capitalism.
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*Any trickster could have told him you can stand on air forever so long as you don't look down.*
Please use this in a story if you can. I love it.
Have a *hug* for capitalism. Then several more.
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For all I know, it might work if you did that! I believe the last couple of lines of the book to be important, but I can always copy them out for you as needed.
Pout's oaths remind me of "Toasted cheese!" from Lud.
I loved him very much as a child. He also swears "By all the saints of Ely!" but I'm pretty sure actual people do that.
Please use this in a story if you can. I love it.
Thank you. I'll see what I can do.
Have a *hug* for capitalism. Then several more.
*hugs*
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I hadn't thought of his alliteration in years. I remember all the weird, classical, deep-time parts of that book and would have to go back for the rest.
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Any trickster could have told him...
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Much appreciated. I figured I might as well be up front about it!
I'd never realized that refrain was its own thing wandering from song to song, though!
I'd never encountered it anywhere other than this book until I heard "Beech and Willow," at which point I found out it occurs in the same family of riddle songs as "The Nine Questions" and "I Gave My Love a Cherry." I don't know where the pseudo-Latin comes in.
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It's really losing its luster for me!
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I'm glad to hear it! The Coming of Pout is, inevitably, the only thing of his I have ever read.
(That sounds kind of catastrophically bad as a novel, like, did he not read any novels himself, which clearly he has, but.)
Presumably he had an editor who had also read novels, and I don't know what happened there, either!
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It's from the mid-'60's, by which point we were definitely seeing children's fantasies that didn't have to end like the breaking of a spell—or at least not so clumsily if they did. I don't know what Blair was reading at the time when he wrote it. Now I'm curious and it's driven almost entirely by annoyance, which feels unfair.
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The editor thing is a mystery--I saw the additional comments downthread, too. One wonders whether his editor had a small grudge and wanted something with Blair's name to go out into the world despite being ... catastrophic.
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*hugs*
Nine
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Oh, the illustrations are wonderful. I wish I could find even a decent-sized picture of the cover on the internet:
The interior ones are unmistakably her style, but they have a touch of illuminated marginalia, which is appropriate. [edit] I ended up taking a bunch of pictures for
There are just some stories that if you do them right, you don't need to explain them at all, even puzzles. They put themselves into place.
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I believe you that the ending of The Coming of Pout is a soggy faceplant, but the book up until then sounds gloriously weird and cool!
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That's so cool! I grew up with "I Gave My Love a Cherry" and "Tumbalalayka," which are good training in riddles but do not contain dog-Latin.
Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini is the chorus I learned.
Anne Lister uses "Petrum patrum paradisi tempori, perry merry dixi, dominee," which last I admit I am spelling according to The Coming of Pout because I've never seen a lyrics sheet for her. When it is possible to visit in person, I hope you don't mind if I ask you to sing your version for me.
I believe you that the ending of The Coming of Pout is a soggy faceplant, but the book up until then sounds gloriously weird and cool!
I really like it until it faceplants, which is why it drives me up the wall.
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"I Gave My Love a Cherry" I grew up with too, and still love! I don't really know "Tumbalalayka"; when we can visit in person, I will ask you to repay me for Partem Portem by singing it for me. :D
When it is possible to visit in person, I hope you don't mind if I ask you to sing your version for me.
Happily! Though as I say, it's an improvisational one as I learned it:
I had four brothers over the sea,
Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini
And each sent a present unto me,
Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini
The first sent a [person 1 fills in the present here -- an X without any Y, or whatever]
Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini
The second sent a [person 2 fills in the present]
Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini
The third sent a [person 3 fills in the present]
Partem portem perry dissentem, perry merry dictum, domini
The fourth sent a [person 4 fills in the present]
Adapt to the number of people, of course, but the standard family way was bouncing person to person in a car. You didn't have to have an answer to the riddle, I don't think, although possibly that was the ideal? But it was supposed to follow a riddle-ish sort of pattern. I'll ask my mom about it next time I talk to her, because she's the one who grew up actually singing it on car trips more.
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Yay!
I don't really know "Tumbalalayka"; when we can visit in person, I will ask you to repay me for Partem Portem by singing it for me.
Gladly! What is the point of the folk tradition otherwise?
The first sent a [person 1 fills in the present here -- an X without any Y, or whatever]
So either you need to know other riddle songs to crib from or you need to be able to think really fast. That's brilliant and as soon as I ran through the variations named above, I would die.
I'll ask my mom about it next time I talk to her, because she's the one who grew up actually singing it on car trips more.
I'd love to hear what she says. I don't think I have ever encountered a riddle-contest in the wild as opposed to deeply formative books of my childhood.
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I belatedly remembered to ask her about it! She agreed that I was remembering it correctly, and confirmed that it's really not about making riddles with solutions -- "nonsense, it's supposed to be nonsense," she said firmly (and added that usually she'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel for material around the third round of it). So a tree without any roots, a house without any walls, a dog without any bark, etc etc -- you could definitely crib from riddle-songs if you wanted, I'm sure, but the point is absurdism rather than an improv riddle-contest, at least in the family tradition. She also confirms that it's from her father, and as far as she knows came from his parents, although if it goes further back I don't know. That puts it as at least a century old, though, as this is a long-generationed family.
And that is what I know!
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Your long-generationed family is really cool.
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*** cool ***
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(Also, fabulous icon from a very fun movie ^_^)
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I don't remember you mentioning it, but I look forward to whenever you describe it in more detail, because M.R James writing children's fantasy is conceptually fascinating.
(In The Five Jars’ case, the problem wasn’t overexplanation, it was more that it just kind of stops.)
Query: is it worse to have no ending or an ending that doesn't work? Discuss with examples from contemporary literary and media.
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I wonder if I still like those books. I haven't reread them in my adult life.
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I don't know if I've read that series—with rare exceptions like Ballet Shoes or The Children on the Top Floor, my ability to connect the plots of books by Noel Streatfeild with their titles is surprisingly terrible, I blame it on the dual titles—but I think it's really neat they contain this song!
For what it's worth, I have found other Streatfeild to hold up on re-read, and my godchild loved both Ballet Shoes and Curtain Up/Theater Shoes.
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Would it work to simply not read the last chapter?
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Here: I couldn't find that anyone had scanned the interior illustrations, so I photographed some. Photo quality middling (the light in my office is coming from several directions at once and it shows), but you should be able to get the idea.
--I mean! with a trickster and Sun and Moon siblings? What's not to love?? But the ending...
Right! And it's such a weird failure. I've read books that run like dreams all the way through—Susan Cooper's Seaward (1983) always comes first to mind—but even if the characters have to wake sometime, they don't have to wake to quite so much exposition.
Would it work to simply not read the last chapter?
I don't know! I double-checked after
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I don't know about the famous cheese sandwich ending--do they elaborate it in a blog post or SH post where I can read about it?
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You're welcome! I love her work and this instance of it seems to be little-known. As far as I can tell, the book got one British and one American printing and that was it. I've never met anyone else who's even read it.
plus I'm having an urge to color them in--not because they need color but just because the lines are calling to me. The decapitation illustration is !!
I think if you want to print them out and color them, you should! It's not like defacing a book.
I don't know about the famous cheese sandwich ending--do they elaborate it in a blog post or SH post where I can read about it?
I'm sorry—it was either coined or transmitted to me in 2016 when I was complaining to them about Helen Eustis' The Horizontal Man (1946). The idea is that some books and movies end so badly that the best thing to do is replace the last ten minutes/pages with a cheese sandwich. (We did in fact make grilled cheese for dinner after I had gotten the complaining out of my system.) The B-movie I Bury the Living (1958) is another memorable example, although in that case the ending was famously messed around with by the studio and is therefore not entirely the film's fault. Here it is definitely the fault of the book.