Transparent Words - Articles

 

HARRY GRAHAM, THE RUTHLESS RHYMER

By Bill Melrose

 

The first book of Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, by Harry Graham, may have caused a furore in the salons of Mayfair in 1899, but it is virtually unknown today. A classic in its own genre deserves a better fate.

Captain Harry J.C. Graham, (1874-1936), was a product of Eton, Sandhurst and the Coldstream Guards. He had a good London address in Montague Square, W1, and his clubs were the Beefsteak and the Garrick.

The ‘establishment’ in late Victorian and Edwardian England enjoyed their goodly heritage and prosperity. Cleanliness was next to godliness, solvency to virtue, and respectability obliterated a multitude of sins. Good form was all, and yet it was in such a hidebound climate that Graham, a pillar of the establishment, started to produce witheringly funny, iconoclastic verse.

There was another side to the glitter of Edwardian England. Wilde said that "Queen Victoria sat on England like a great paper weight and after her death things blew all over the place." There was a reaction to some of the Victorian attitudes, notably its self-satisfaction and its unquestioned acceptance of authority, religious, secular and moral. Writers such as Shaw, Wells and Belloc set out, in their varying ways, to undermine the complacency. Graham contributed by using humour as his weapon. His style is based on the satirical epigram, brief, pithy and cruel. The lyric form and metre convey a gross message. The ironic tension between form and content enhances the intended surprise. No subject is too sensitive;

Weep not for little Leone

Abducted by a French Marquis

Though loss of honour was a wrench

Just think how it's improved her French!

 

Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tales’ are, in part, a reaction against Victorian didacticism – pastiches of a kind of serious verse once written for the instruction and edification of the young. They all have a moral – Jim ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion, Henry King chewed bits of string and was cut off in dreadful agony, and Matilda told lies and was burned to death. Graham disdains the edifying moral, or if there is one, he reduces it to absurdity.

Father heard his children scream,

So he threw them in the stream,

Saying as he drowned the third,

"Children should be seen, not heard."

 

His households are full of splendidly uncaring parents, who today would feel the full force of the social worker’s wrath.

 

When, with my little daughter Blanche,

I climbed the Alps last summer,

I saw a dreadful avalanche

About to overcome her;

And, as it swept her down the slope,

I vaguely wondered whether

I should be wise to cut the rope

That held us twain together.

I must confess I’m glad I did,

But still I miss the child – poor kid.

This attitude demands a case conference at the very least. Similarly, horrendous child abuse is transformed into diverting bad taste by an irresistible final couplet

When baby’s cries grew hard to bear,

` I popped him in the Frigidaire.

I never would have done so if

I’d known that he’d be frozen stiff.

My wife said, "George, I’m so unhappé!

Our darling’s now completely frappé.

 

Compassion, too, gets short shrift, and respect for the memory of a dear dead child is comically ghoulish;

Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,

Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes;

Now, although the nights grow chilly,

I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.

 

Children have no redeeming features. Their murderous misdeeds are praised with a lofty disregard for moral standards.

My son, Augustus, in the street, one day,

Was feeling quite exceptionally merry.

A stranger asked him; "Can you show me, pray,

The quickest way to Brompton cemetery?"

"The quickest way? You bet I can," said Gus,

And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.

Whatever people say about my son,

He does enjoy his little bit of fun.

 

The incidentals of laughter are as clearly shaped by their period as fashions in clothes, so there is a danger that their relevance and immediacy may fade as time passes and social habits change. Graham’s heartless homes are run by nurses and servants who are as careless and callous and accident prone as their masters. These anachronistic appendages could make the humour as bland and bewildering as an old issue of Punch to the modern reader. But the tyranny of Graham’s humour is not dated. It remains as ruthless and biting as the day it was written. Relative values are inverted in true comedic style;

Making toast at the fireside,

Nurse fell in the grate and died;

And, what makes it ten times worse,

All the toast was burned with nurse.

 

Harry Graham’s lightness of touch makes offensive incidents inoffensive. There is no rancour, just a sublime indifference to normal codes of conduct. Cherished notions are wrong footed with a languid, tongue-in-cheek disdain.

The overrated limericks of Edward Lear still find a place on many shelves; Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, justifiably retain their popularity, while the satirical modernity and the exhilarating wickedness of Graham’s verse are all but lost to the reader. Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes is out of print. His part authorship of The Maid of the Mountains, White Horse Inn and Land of Smiles, titles which jog the memory, has long since been forgotten. Sometimes, browsing through an anthology of comic verse, one of his coruscating gems of bad taste will appear. It may just be a few throwaway lines but they are always worth looking for;

In the drinking well

Which the plumber built her,

Aunt Eliza fell…

…We must buy a filter.