Odd this day
26 July 1873
It’s the 152nd anniversary today of literary journal The Athenæum running a review of a debut volume of verse. That may not immediately sound riveting, but this is an opportunity to look at the life and work of Theophilius Marzials, a man who deserves to be at least as renowned as William McGonagall…
So, let’s begin our mockery of this unfortunate expired author by laughing at the very silly name of the book in question (which he dedicates to Théodore Aubanel, himself the author — apparently — of The Cleft Pomegranate, which sounds like a lost work by Edward Gorey):
Yes, yes, Coates. It’s all very well taking the piss out of someone’s literary ambitions, you bitter, frustrated man, but what exactly is so wrong with his work? Well, here is the opening verse of that opening poem:
It runs in a similar vein for a further 38 — yes, 38 — pages, including:
…which rather begs the response: no, it’s a swoop of egrets. It’s a pamplemousse of pigeons.
The Athenæum (under the headline ‘Two Minor Poets’, and that alone must have stung a bit) focused on one five-line extract:
…and then launched into a patronising, snobbish, but (let’s be honest) also hilarious demolition of the work:
Mr. Marzials is, we believe, of French extraction. Judging by a sonnet which he prefixes to his book, we should say that he is more at home in French than in our language; and possibly this may account for the necessity which he seems to be under of making the most of his English vocabulary; but we must say that the repetition of the same word five times in three lines shows a certain want of familiarity with the language in which he writes. We doubt, too, his authority for “williad,” “rubriel,” “rudded,” “crudded,” “while ‘re,” “loriot,” and many other words and forms which he gives us.
So, who was this unfortunate? Well, information about him is not exactly thick on the ground, but apparently — despite being named Théophile-Jules-Henri Marzials — he was British, and his command of the language was enough to get him a job in the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum, alongside fellow literary figures such as Edmund Gosse and J A Symonds. So he can’t have been as bad at English as most English people (of his or any other age) are at French. He was, though, genuinely terrible at poetry. A 44-page(!) epic, The Temple of Love, features this verse:
…and then, a couple of pages later — in case you thought the aquatic reptiles were an aberration — this one:
…so I hope we can all agree that he ranks comfortably alongside John Lillison, “England’s greatest one-armed poet”:
I suppose the mistake he made, if he wanted to be remembered for longer, was that while his rhymes are forced, and his images ludicrous, he does stick to some of the other rules of poetry. William Topaz McGonagall became a legend for getting all this wrong, while also failing to grasp scansion.
Anyway, back to biography. Marzials was not the poetic Messiah, but he was, apparently, a very naughty boy. The Department of Printed Books was run — with a rod of iron — by the Reverend Frederick Laughlin, but Edmund Gosse (quoted in the biography of him by Ann Thwaite) said the team there was
so meanly paid and so villainously housed that neither activity nor assiduity could be expected from them.
Marzials himself (according to the same source) wrote of
the unpleasant severity, the official discourtesy and the irritating surveillance, the pedantry and red tapeism of those weary, alien, sodden years at the Museum.
So, as we are often told people did in the days before television, the young men made their own entertainment. Thwaite herself says the department “was full of puppyish sinners”, and Gosse adds that:
Cricket was not unpractised in the remoter galleries.
The Life And Letters Of Sir Edmund Gosse tells a splendid story of one day when the cat was away (all too briefly):
Gosse used to relate that on one occasion Laughlin went out to fetch a book. Discipline was at once relaxed. Some began to talk, others to sing. Suddenly he returned. Decorum was immediately restored. In the mean-time Théophile Marzials had climbed to an upper gallery, also in search of a book; having found it, he leant over a bar looking with his wide aureole of golden hair like the Blessed Damozel, and smiled. There was no response. Dead silence save for the driving quills. Leaning still further out he boomed down on the workers below, “Am I or am I not the Department’s darling?” Laughlin turned his head slowly and looked upwards-one look. Marzials fled, and the sound of his footsteps was heard echoing up the metal stairways till they seemed to fade away into infinity.
That sounds, does it not, like not just a jape, but an incredibly camp one, to boot? Well… Thwaite calls him “picturesque” [looks to camera], and Phyllis Grosskurth (a biographer of J A Symonds) says Symonds saw him and Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower (who got caught up in the Cleveland Street Scandal) as examples of
those individuals who amuse themselves with experiments in sensual pleasure, men jaded with ordinary sexual indulgence, and indifferent voluptuaries
…which was a bit rich coming from Symonds, who defined “Greek love” as
a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.
Still, that unflattering Athenæum review may have had all this in mind when it said of him:
Mr Marzials dwells among marble columns, oleanders, rebecks, pleasances, large-lipped women, soft brown limbs and lissome thighs
…but I seem to have digressed away from his work somewhat, so here’s one of his ‘Bagatelles’. You could, I think, if you were so inclined, write an acceptable undergraduate essay comparing and contrasting this with William Blake’s The Sick Rose — but then again, I’m not sure I’d bother.
…and this is one of his ‘Tragedies’, which rather begs the question, well, why am I laughing like an idiot*, then?
Incredibly, according to A History of the British Museum library, 1753-1973, Marzials “eventually earned far more from his writing than he did from his work in the Museum”, but there’s an explanation for this. He was also a lyricist, coming up with A Creole Love Song:
…and Twickenham Ferry, apparently making a shit-ton of cash (I paraphrase somewhat) from sales of sheet music. Sample verse:
“Ahoy! and O-ho! and it’s who’s for the ferry?”
(The briar’s in bud and the sun going down)
“And I’ll row ye so quick and I’ll row ye so steady,
And t’is but a penny to Twickenham Town.”
The ferryman’s slim and the ferryman’s young,
With just a soft tang in the turn of his tongue;
And he’s fresh as a pippin and brown as a berry,
And t’is but a penny to Twickenham Town.
(I can’t help wondering if — because he did these for the money — he just knocked them out, unconcerned for quality, and came up with something that may not be brilliant, but works to music, but when it came to poetry, he tried too hard.)
You can also hear that one, if you feel so moved:
Apparently, he was also the librettist for an opera based on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and enjoyed royalties on all this lyric writing of £1,000 a year (around £100,000 today).
Money, however, may not have been all that good for Theo. According to Ann Thwaite, he became addicted: to boys, which wasn’t necessarily a problem at the time (as long as you didn’t get caught), but also to “Dr. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne” — and, according to that history of the British Library:
He may have started taking this foul-sounding stuff because — according to an old British Library blog:
He suffered from ill-heath throughout his employment, and in … 1878 was late for work 27 times, and off sick for 33 days … In December 1882 his doctor stated that Marzials’ work in the Museum was ‘calculated to depress his vital and mental powers, and to deteriorate his health in a considerable degree’. He was pensioned off at £38 a year [about £3,900 today].
One way or another, though, The Gallery of Pigeons was the only volume of poetry he ever published. I haven’t been able to discover whether he was put off by that review, or if he just decided to concentrate on the more lucrative songs, or if the muse (such as it was) deserted him.
One thing I have discovered about him is that Ford Madox Ford called him
the handsomest, the wittiest, the most brilliant and the most charming of poets
…which suggests to me that FMF was drunk at the time. Because I’ve saved the ‘best’ for last. Thinking about that hypothetical undergraduate essayist again, he or she might be able to make a case that this final poem was just way ahead of its time — avant-garde before such a thing was ever conceived of — but 1997 book Very Bad Verse called it The Worst Poem Ever Written in the English Language, and I know who I agree with.
Judge for yourselves, though.
Ladies and gentlemen: Theo Marzials’ A Tragedy:
DEATH!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop,
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop.
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
And all is running in water and sky,
And my head shrieks — “Stop,”
And my heart shrieks — “Die.”* * * * *
My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart;
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them — and fled
They are all every one ! — and I stand, and start,
All the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Flop, plop.* * * * *
A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew — I knew —
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end —
My Devil — my “Friend”
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh! and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is as empty as air —I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop,
The barges flop
Drip, drop.)
I can dare, I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head,
And stop.
Drop
Dead.
Plop, flop.Plop.
I can’t format it here quite as it appears on the page, but the whole damn thing’s online…
…if you want the full effect.
