A Peal of Bells

From A William Maidment Garland

– They order, said I. Shall we order? Prefatory Introduction

The waitress, Alice, with chocolate mousse or Introductory Preface

And a menu of dishes in other languages

Bent low over us as we were reading

A collation drawn from sundry sources.

Alice said, – What is the use of a book

Without pictures or conversations?

– This is a cerebration, said the mandarin.

– A macaronic pasta, please, said the sultana.

– And, in between, let us converse

And let us rejoice and rehearse each use

Of the auxiliary verbs. – With herbs

And plentiful garnishes let us have

Variety, sweet variety, zeugma the essence

Of multiplicity, hence of art. Example:

‘She looked across the harbour and

A million dollars.’ – I’ll have, quoth I,

To quaff, the didactic soup. – With sippets?

– A hoddle-poddle, hotch-potch or mish-mash?

– With snippets of other men’s flowers.

– Is this not derivativeness, said Alice, Tradition and the Individual Talent

Yesterdays coldly furnished forth?

– Sir, quoth my uncle Toby, let every man

Tell his story in his own way.

– And a soupçon of the Aristotelian A Secondary Theme

Main dish with a view to sampling

The infinite variety of desserts ranged

Round it like irrigated flowering deserts,

In all directions the universe

Finite but unbounded or is it

Infinite but bounded? The waitress

Bounded to our side. – Sirs,

We are expecting an event of some moment

After this repast which is mere preface.

– Would you please welcome –

– We are expecting the appearance of – The Theme

– A bumper for Bill!

– A Bumper Annual for Bill!

– We'll repair to the library forecourt,

Said Alice, as one speaking in a palace,

So that when I stretched out my hand to raise my glass –

A Gasp of Air

Someone shouted, – Be a football

To time and chance. And we were in the vast

Outdoors with conversation our only support,

Columns and pillars elevating the heavens.

And someone was going on and on

In a circular fashion about being caught flagrantly

With someone delectable in a revolving door. Then

We were suddenly out in the light A Nod in the Direction Pastoral

Where a grove of expectant trees had been

Standing since dawn, umbelliferous

Disorder the source of all beauty.

– The person at large in the flux

May be likened to the planetary model

Of matter itself, the Aristotelian unity

Its nucleus, and round it the great The Secondary Theme Explored

Corridor of discussion which corresponds

To the probability haze of a handful

Of electrons. Alice ran after us

Into the high-heeled street. – Sirs, your bill! A Pun Questionable in

The word echoed pleasantly in the world. The Circumstances

But a strange quickening of events

Was underway, at the approaching comet

Of that birthday we were gathered to see

Touched off like a Catherine Wheel.

A crowd of us had gathered by the tethering rails

Outside the library, there to catch a glimpse A Pause and a Beginning

And shake the hand, if that were feasible

Granted the press and weight of numbers assembled,

Of William Maidment who was today dressing up

As Neptune and crossing the International Date Line

Into his eighth decade. There was a considerable

Jostling; the warmth of esteem met the hush

Of expectation. The first Mexican wave

Passed down this fair field of folk. Then

Banners were raised, anticipating his appearance

On the balcony of history to much applause.

Brightly the balustrades waved their signs:

“Widow Wadman Wishes You Well. Protestations of Well-Wishers

Come up and see me some time”;

“Greetings from Gallimaufrical Glasgow”;

“Twenty five thousand days bathing

In a warm wash of words”; “Roll on thou deep

And dark blue ocean”; “Yo”; “Excelsior”;

“At the dog's bone of letters let us gnaw”;

“Books give not wisdom where was none before

But where some is, there reading makes it more”;

“To the eighth decade and all who sail in her”;

“Irascible Rasselas, where are you now

That we need you?” Then through our throng

A stranger approached and asked us, – Sirs, A Stranger

What manner of man is this who so enthrals

This great assembly that they will hourly wait

His appearance on the battlements? Is he

The scourge of mediocrity, the cleanser

Of the temple, excoriating the pallid

Wherever it raises its head and lopping off

That head and then the two and four and twenty

Which grow in its place? Or is he

The snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, A Dilemma

Favouring these with the rich custard of applause

And the sprinkled nuts of interest and curiosity,

At pains to point out every slight eminence

On the drought plains of a text,

Generous to a fault, benign, persistent

As my uncle Toby's wound? – Well, yes

And no. I mean, what is jesting Indecision

Definition? Who is sylvan?

Remember, in this connection, Johnson, and Johnson Enlisted

I quote: ‘Sometimes, things may be

Made darker by definition. I see a cow.

I define her Animal quadrupes

Ruminans cornutam. But a goat

Ruminates and a cow may have

No horns. Cow is plainer.’

Thus the difficulties at this time

In my leaping to either bank

Of your dichotomy, and falling between them

Like the ill-fated Colossus of Rhodes.

Then others said, taking up the torch, A Clamour of Voices

– Not firing mortars from an ivory tower …

– Contempt for cant and scant regard for Kant …

– No Garboesque Leavisalones … – The famous

No! In Thunder made Arcadian Faults He Eschewed

With April Showers … – His was not

The severe practice of the exclusive

And its personalised number-plate EFFOFF

Disappearing down the highway ahead of us …

– Nor had he truck with the assertion

Of a nit-picking fractious fractal dissolving

Into infinity … – Lichtenberg’s ‘moral backside’

He ensured covered by the ‘trousers of decorum’

– Living in glass houses he don’t kick stones. Johnson Ubiquitous

– I agree with the first speaker.

Another stood on a box to address us:

– He tried to give us all a better view,

Clearing the log–jam at the waterfall

Of seminal works (while never losing sight

Of any one particular log).

In this he was like that most sleight Johnson Omnipresent

And agile Dr Johnson who,

At the artificial waterfall

(Which Dr Taylor had shored up,

Damming a river in his garden),

Leapt with a heavy wielding pole

And cleared locked branches and, at that,

A swelled, obstructive, large, dead cat

(Though Johnson out of breath had help Johnson’s Lack of Condition

From Boswell to dislodge the cat).

At this the fall could be admired;

That curtain every man desired

Now unimpeded, calmly flowed.

– But wait, another cried with an interpolation,

Brewer tells how Irish rats were once An Odious Comparison Averted

Subdued and scattered by the chanting

Of metrical verse! Therefore

Let us be expansive and not set Bill,

On this festive day,

In such a company.

Rather let us give him every benefit of

Delicious doubt, be as unspecific and liberal,

As unregulated and free, as befits A Tabula Rasa the Best Gift

This auspicious time, and not present him

With any resolution or definition or decision

Or determination any more binding,

Nor let anything fait be any more accompli,

Than the blank Chapter XVIII

Of the last volume of Tristram Shandy

Where My Uncle Toby Visits the Widow Wadman.

The stranger said, – I thank you. I feel the rare

Zest of the air, the spray fresh in my face

From the breaking wave of this joyful moment

And the imminence of his arrival here;

But I have heard, so far, much

That he is not, much that is tendentious,

Allusive, if alluring, and tangential. I would like

To hear some attempt at encompassing,

Or encapsulating all that he is. At this

A courtier in rich attire

Took up the gage and, clearing his throat

Replied in alphabetic mode: – He is A Brief Curriculum

Affable yet adamant,

Buoyant, benign,

Cogitative and cognoscent,

Dictionarian, diaphanous to the light of fact,

Edificative, elucubrationary,

Fabulously fruitful and fruitive,

Genial, generous, gustful and Grandisonian.

He is happily heterodox,

Igniferous,

Jocund,

Kindly, kindling,

Mettlesome and meteoric, metaphoric,

Needling and nettle-grasping,

Occam’s Razored and obdurate (where appropriate),

Preceptorial, pluralistic and

Quintessential, quick and quippy. He is

Recondite, rutilant,

Sprag,

Tonitruous and torpedinous (to defend truth),

Ungainsayable but undercumstumbling,

Vital,

Wittily wise,

Yare, yarnspinning,

Zealous and Zenonian.

– Yes, said the stranger, but …

At this, a further quickening of events: Developments

At the library’s automatic–opening doors

A woman with her arms filled with dahlias

Paused, as if, having studied too many Empiricists,

She were uncertain whether her substantiality

Might be sufficient to operate the sensor Philosophical Doubts

And open the doors. The thought occurred

Also that she might yet bypass,

By the simple act of thought, causality,

‘The cement of the world’. Yet the doors

Opened and the resultant breeze, expelled

By the airconditioning draft, fluttered Sundry Events

Petals from the dahlias to the ground.

A bird was singing, singing

Its own One Note Samba.

A cyclist was slowing his bicycle

To a wobble. The Lady of the Dahlias said

To the world in general and the cyclist in particular

– Observe this stately crowd gathered here

For W. Maidment and his entry

On to the high lake of his seventieth year;

He who taught us to read, to disintricate

Without reduction or loss, for him

I have cast down these petals … There was

A moment of indecision. Then the world

Felt replete, like an ablative absolute,

All having been made in readiness

For his arrival within the hour. Suggestions of a Mysterious Subplot

And almost at once there was an unlikely

Quickening of events. Alice inexplicably

Came out into the cloud-chamber of the yard.

The sun was photographing every proceeding.

She had exchanged her apron for a white

Ensemble with matching bolero

And colour-co-ordinated parasol.

Unexpectedly she approached the stranger, and

‘Flinging her arms about him’ embraced him.

At length she stepped back and said

To him and to all of us, – Now I hope One Last Delay

You haven’t let them all go on

Too long and get carried away

With the enticements of narrative. I know

Bill would not want that kind of excess.

The library doors opened once more. A wave

Like the energy in an uncoiled rope A Curious Practice

Snaked out across the expectant crowd

Agog in their compound, waiting a sign.

One of the library staff, the one with long red hair

Who, serenely bemused, looked like those

Several disciples of the twelve

Given merely walk-on parts, walked out

With a trolley of books into the sunlit court.

Someone confided, – They do this with the books,

Or a number of them, on this day

Each year. It is thought that these texts,

Absorbing the sun, then burgeon and ripen

As a peach or melon ripens and mellows.

But now our jubilant patience Fulfilment

Would soon be rewarded. The doors

Opened. The sound of cannon mingled with

The roar of traffic from the metropolis.

Bells were ringing. William Maidment

Appears – but briefly – in the doorway.

As bells continue to ring he disappears A Slight Technical Hiatus

Back into the gloom to re-desensitise

One book which librarians smilingly

In the spirit of these celebrations

Have left still charged, thereby to add,

To this glissade of bells, their own. Soon

He reappears, in triumph on the ziggurat,

Unbowed, bearing bundles of books.

Euphoria is general and unconfined.

Now the clouds, which must, it seems, A Vision

Carry a burden of baroque visitations, took the form

Of towers, watering places, hot springs,

Temples, carriages, topiaries. Here,

In the cornucopian hammock of clouds,

Appeared briefly a number of notables,

Worthies, long-familiars, ramblers, spectators, idlers,

Who, as if leaning from some closed barouche,

Called out in one voice their greeting. – Sir,

We have been reading this day

From a projected supplement to a continuation

Of the Tristra-paedia and are therefore

Glad of this opportunity to desist.

We rejoice to take this opportunity

To congratulate you and thank you, Sir, High Praise

Who are one of our finest Readers ever,

Penetrant, assiduous, acute, Universal,

In whom we subsist, inhere, may travel still;

To our journeys to the Hebrides, and Abyssinia,

And The Whole Island of Great Britain, and France,

And Italy, and Portugal, and Ireland,

We may add the pleasant perambulations

Made possible through your perusals.

But, Sir, we detain you from your guests.

Of all Appearances such as now we contrive

To greet you on this day, the Metempsychosal,

Visionary and Metaphysical were best made brief.

Touching that subject, one of our number here

Now voices the sentiment, all too often honoured

In the breach: Length is my greatest Disgust,

(Who himself tolerably well overcame such distaste

In epistolary fictions of heroic proportions),

So that, even as our warm light reaches you,

In our legion, Sir, we salute you, and depart.

As arrow-forms of lorikeets A Coda

Against the dazzling cirrus sky

Fly overhead in their salutes,

Eliza, Stella, Jenny, Alice,

Bright-eyed, high-heeled, amongst us ply

With trays of wine and orange juice.

Hours later in the silver field

The admiring crowds still press to graze,

And dusk at last couches with gold

The multiple and tangling threads

Of conversations laced with praise,

Until the lawns glisten with webs

Of laughter, hope and reveries.

The lawn’s an orchard. Here we meet

To share the proffered, ripened fruit

Of pleached and grafted reading years.

Notes

A William Maidment Garland is a tribute to William Maidment,

scholar, mentor and friend. A Peal of Bells revolves around an

incident: I was upstairs in the University library and hearing bells

looked out to see bill obliged to return when one of the books in

his haversack set of alarms. He had come down from his locker

on the 6th Floor above which for years had been the graffito

The horror! The horror!

The poem begins with the opening words of A Sentimental Journey

And a little later touches on its famous closing (part) sentence.

Sterne is also present again: The Widow Wadman; the invitation

To review the auxiliary verbs; the alphabetical list; the Tristrapaedia.

“Be a football…”: Emerson.

“Books give not wisdom”: Harrington, Epigrams.

“Unconsidered trifles”: Shakespeare, as is of course, “coldly

furnished forth”.

No! in Thunder: Leslie Fiedler’s exhortation to affirm excellence

By denouncing mediocrity.

“The cement of the world”: J.Mackie’ term for causation as treated

By Hume.

Rats: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

Gallimaufrical Glasgow refers to Bill’s research into Emblem Books there.

“Length is my greatest disgust”: Richardson

The cadential visitors leaning from their cloudy barouche are Fielding,

Smollett, Johnson, Sterne and Swift, all in Bill’s pantheon.