Friday 26 December 2014

Hope...


XIV.

“The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes – or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two – is gone.”


The Christmas holiday period seems like an appropriate time to get into this verse. Here, we see an expression of the notion that worldly existence is illusory and that the things of the physical world are impermanent and non-lasting. In fact this stanza is quite Buddhist in its approach, although I suspect that Omar and FitzGerald would both find the idea faintly heretical.

By “Worldly Hope” we are told that we shouldn’t put too much faith in tangible, physical things. Things of the spirit are what last, while baubles and trinkets fade over time and lose their efficacy – they “turn Ashes”. This is not to say that we should have no hope whatsoever; it just means that the Bird of Time will eventually pass by the things of this world upon which we count to see us through.

Money drains away; fortresses crumble; youth and beauty fades. Politics shifts; ideals are replaced with new ones; treaties and contracts are broken. The only constant in the world is change and trying to fight it is like trying to pin a river in place with a lance.


There is a sense though, that worldly things do offer comfort - they turn ashes or they prosper. Some things will return on an investment; in the long term however, they disappear like snow falling on a desert. But, like snow falling onto the dust, it creates a small space of beauty and pleasure before vanishing – it lights a little hour and is gone.

With Christmas consumerism in full overdrive, I was sent a link to a Youtube channel with a short program displaying the “Top Ten Most Expensive Things on the Planet”. These ranged from a $2,000,000 pair of shoes, to a $16,200,000 iPhone, to a $52,000,000 ocean liner, to a woman willing to sell her virginity to the highest bidder – at last count $3,700,000. The whole display made me feel only that we live in a pretty sick world where such transactions and manufacturing take place. Sure, $16,200,000 makes for a pretty swanky mobile phone (until the next model comes out) but that amount of cash could also cure quite a bit of Ebola, I’m thinking.


I’m not sure that Omar (and FitzGerald) are telling us that we should invest wisely, that we should “live like there’s no tomorrow, but farm as if we’ll live forever” (as the Africans have it); in the context of their general “seize the day” philosophy, maybe they’re telling us we should just go for that diamond-studded footwear and be damned. If it makes you feel good, then why not? Just remember: it won’t last.



Monday 16 June 2014

Orientalism...


ROTHENSTEIN, Jerome, Sketch of Rabindranath Tagore, 1912.

347mm x 257mm; pencil on buff paper stock, signed and dated by the artist; inscribed in ink with a dedication to Danish publisher Povl Branner by Rabindranath Tagore, May 23rd 1921; original wooden frame.

The story of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald is not unusual by any means; the tale of the visionary Easterner championed by the lettered Westerner has many historical precedents. Most put it down to the fascination which the East has for those of Occidental origins – Edward W. Said wrote all about it in his groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978).


The essence of the concept is that jaded Western palates find excitement and a certain frisson in what they perceive to be the licence and exoticism of the Orient; the East becomes a fantastic playground, filled with possibilities rendered incapable of fulfilment in the prosaic, workaday paradigm of Western culture. Whether or not such decadence and extravagance is the actual daily reality of Eastern individuals is rendered moot: the Orientalist ideal is a fantasy projected upon a foreign culture by those dwelling outside of its compass.

In no small part does this explain the fascination that the Rubaiyat has for many readers in the English-speaking world: the poem abounds with Eastern imagery and references. It also seems to espouse radical values, and to place those values – exciting and revolutionary as they seem – within the Oriental context. I question however, whether the sentiments credited to Omar and synthesised through the pen of FitzGerald, have made that journey entirely intact.

It’s easy to forget that Edward FitzGerald laid a heavy hand upon the quatrains penned by Khayyam; he re-wrote them quite loosely into the English idiom and he re-arranged them in an order that satisfied his aesthetic demands. It’s not entirely unreasonable to credit FitzGerald’s detractors with some degree of correctness when they say that his translation was imprecise. Even I recognise the dangers of taking Omar Khayyam at face value through the medium of Edward FitzGerald: in my case, it’s just that I prefer his version before all the others.

Still, the Orientalist sensibilities of the reader is mostly what draws them to this work. It’s no stretch of the imagination to grasp that that is what the Pre-Raphaelites took from it; or that it was the hook which snared the succeeding generations of Aesthetes, Symbolists, Decadents and other artists of the fin de siecle period of new century enthusiasm. It’s not hard to see how the poem’s carpe diem sentiments set fires among the hearts of the between-Wars survivors and jaded seekers after a new society: the mad iconoclasm of the Twenties and Thirties, with its desperate flailing around to find something of meaning and purpose to cling to, could latch onto many things but few better than FitzGerald’s truisms.

But, to reiterate, I can’t help but feel that most of the values expressed in the poem are FitzGerald’s and not, strictly speaking, Omar’s.


As an example of what I’m getting at, I’d like to turn to another Easterner whose vision and artistry forged inroads into the West. Rabindranath Tagore was the polymathic scion of a family blessed with equally-talented individuals, who almost single-handedly revived and energised the literary efforts of his homeland in Bengal. Born to a high-caste Hindu family, he was knighted by King George V and became the first non-Westerner to win a Nobel Prize for literature; he counted amongst his acquaintance Albert Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi and W.B. Yeats, who was instrumental in translating his poetry into English. His best-known work (in English translation) is entitled “Gitanjali” (1913) which was dedicated to William Rothenstein and is a collection of his spiritual poetry:


“When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony – and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.

I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.

I touch by the edge of the far spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.”



Reading about Tagore is quite a different experience to reading his writing (in translation as it is). Many commentators - Yeats amongst them, despite his complete absence of skill with the Bengali tongue - talk of the shimmering quality of his language, and the ecstatic fireworks of his written expression. For me, I find the poetry rather dull and somewhat trite. This is partly because I’m instinctively wary of ecstatic verse – I follow Confucius’ line of argument: “believe in the gods, but keep them at arm’s length”. Secondly, being told that the translation doesn’t do the original justice seems to be a pointless comment: it’s kind of like a “heads-up” before the fact that the writing is going to be bad, with the caveat that I’ll just have to take their word that for it that it’s worthwhile and go along with it. Can’t win; don’t try. I’m being asked to take on faith something I can’t test for myself. And perhaps there’s a bridge they want to sell me, too.

(This is not to say that Tagore’s writing is bad; it’s just not for me. There are some wonderful allusions and turns of phrase here; it’s just not my particular cup of tea.)

This probably sounds terribly cynical but there is a point: Tagore was alive and able to oversee the translation of his own poetry from the original Bengali; Omar Khayyam was not in so enviable a position. I’m pretty sure that Tagore’s writing is telling me exactly what he wanted it to tell me (as far as English can be bent into that shape); I’m fairly convinced that Omar’s poem is telling me largely what FitzGerald wanted it to tell me. On that basis, I’ll go with FitzGerald.

I didn’t just throw the word “cynical” in there on a whim. FitzGerald’s take on Khayyam has a jaded edge to it and I’m fairly sure (Robert Graves would back me on this point) Omar never intended his poems to be read in that way. Sad to say, I suspect that Omar’s quatrains would probably come across more like something written by Tagore if I could read them in the original language. The essential reality of all this is as follows:

FitzGerald’s translation is an Orientalist fantasy; it’s a Western vision dressed up in Persian costume to appeal to Occidental readers. Sure, it’s based on Omar Khayyam’s verses, and sure, those verses and Omar’s reputation in Iran are secure; it’s just that they read a little differently depending upon which side of the line you’re sitting.

Before we get to the end of this roller-coaster, there will be other Orientalist writings which we’ll be looking at for comparison purposes; some of those fall into the Orientalist camp and others don’t, but it’s always wise to keep notions of this distorting lens in mind when looking at these types of writings.



Saturday 14 June 2014

The Rose...


XIII.

Look to the Rose that blows about us – “Lo,
Laughing,” she says, “into the World I blow:
At once the silken Tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw.”


At this point we encounter our second reference to a Rose in the poem and, for the second instance, also find a word that, over time, has fallen from common use, making understanding somewhat tricky. Since, in this verse, they occur together, it seems ideal to attack them both at once.

Firstly, the Rose is a standard image of Sufi iconography. Like many such images, it relates back to the idea of God and is an oft-used symbol of the Deity. Due to their range of colour and intense perfume, and given that they were quite difficult to grow and maintain throughout many water-poor Islamic regions, roses were much sought-after. Sufi adherents equated their heady aroma with the intensity of Divine inspiration and their thorns became symbols of the difficulty in attaining such a union with God.


Islamic art, denied the possibility of creating the likenesses of living beings or naturally-occurring phenomena, devoted itself to the creation of patterns, usually geometric forms of an intricate nature. Roses, in that they present a circular repeating pattern from the inner stamen to the outer petals, were a natural inspiration for many designs, from rugs, to wall or floor mosaics, to windows.


A common notion in spiritual art is the dissolution of matter into the spiritual. In Western cathedrals, the great stained windows (called, incidentally, “rose windows”) seek to dissolve the heavy masonry of the sacred enclosure by bathing the walls in coloured light; in the Islamic world, a similar effect was attained, but by means of patterning the walls in paint, cloth, or tiles.


As the Islamics exulted over the perfection of the rose, so too did the philosophers of the West. In Western thought from the earliest times, the world was considered to be arranged in hierarchies, or tiers of rank, creating an ordered universe. Plants and animals were listed from the “lowest” to the “highest” in terms of certain qualities equating to notions of virtue. This simplistic attempt at rationalising the universe remains with us: even today, we refer to the Lion as the “king of beasts”, and the Eagle as the “king of birds”; so too, is the Rose considered the “king of flowers”.

(Interestingly, this notion of a Universe ranked into order is also a mainstay of Confucian thought, the earliest state-sanctioned religion of China, pre-dating Western philosophy by several millennia. It seems that no matter how separate from each other we think we are, there are always fundamental ways in which we have common ground.)


With the symbolism of the rose firmly in mind, let’s turn to that word which nowadays causes some headaches. That word is “blow”.

In the language of FitzGerald’s day, flowers “blew” all the time. It doesn’t mean that they were tossed by the wind; rather it refers to them bursting open, or blooming. There’s an extra sense to the word in this context, referring to a flower as being just past the point of perfection; to be on its way out. From this sense, we get other expressions, such as “blowzy”, meaning to be colourfully dissipated, and of course “overblown” to mean decadently showy, or over-ripe.

In a sense, FitzGerald (possibly working from a notion only implied by Omar) seems not to be talking about the Rose as a symbol of perfection, but rather as an “everyman” cipher, referencing each individual’s potential rather than appearance. He seems to be saying that every person comes into their own and leaves behind something upon which future generations build. The “Treasure” of the Rose is the seeds of the future, stored in the “Purse” of the flower’s rosehips. FitzGerald devoted most of his life to the growing of flowers, so a botanical metaphor wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for him.


Here again is the idea that there is a finite amount of time for each of us, but coupled with it is the notion that everyone has the potential to create the future, to add something to the “Garden” of creation. That Bird of Time is still relentlessly flapping onwards and time, it seems now, is not the only thing that can be wasted.


Roses, in fact, caused Omar quite a bit of trouble as it turned out, and we’ll get into that further when we hit ruba’i 67; suffice it to say that he placed some value upon being buried by a rose garden when he died. Religious hardliners hunted him most of his life for this obscure reason (among others); nevertheless, roses do bow over his grave in Iran today, and cuttings from those same rosebushes were taken from Persia and planted over FitzGerald’s grave in England.


It’s a fitting symbol of unification and the fostering of peace if ever there was one. Just like the poem itself.




Saturday 7 June 2014

Small Rubaiyats...


The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (no. 6 in the Sesame Booklets series), George G. Harrap & Co., Covent Garden, London, nd.

Sextodecimo; suede yapp covers, with decorated endpapers and gilt spine title, with gilt upper board decoration; 69pp., top edges gilt, with a full-colour frontispiece. Wear and sunning to the binding; some browning to the text block edges; minor foxing to the preliminaries. Very good.

One thing which is a feature of collecting copies of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is that many versions are quite small. There are various reasons for this but the main one is that it became more economical for publishers to produce small copies in the duodecimo (12mo) or sextodecimo (16mo) format, as the amount of paper required to produce one octavo volume could be stretched to create four, six, or even more. While the poem was in its heyday and people often bought and exchanged copies which could be carried in a pocket or purse, this just made good sense from a monetary standpoint.

The giving of copies of the Rubaiyat to friends and lovers was a common occurrence, as we have already seen in the case of Somerton Man. Some publishers even produced their versions with this notion in mind, leading to various “Love and Friendship”, or “Fidelity” printings.


Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald, (Zodiac series), Chatto and Windus, London, 1940.

Octavo; hardcover with decorated boards; 32pp. Front free endpaper removed; previous owner’s inscription on half-title erased. Dustwrapper foxed and worn at the spine panel extremities; now protected by non-adhesive plastic wrap.

Too, the small format meant that other poems, from other favourite poets such as Tennyson, Longfellow, or Browning, could be produced in this size and the collected verses could be marketed as a specific series of favourite poetry. For the most part though, the process was an easy way of using up leftover paper, and other material, from larger print jobs: a common feature is the use of mis-matched illustrated endpapers which have little or no relevance to the work which they bracket, or which are used to identify a volume as being part of a series.


1 - Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia, translated into verse by Edward FitzGerald, with Biography and Notes and Twelve Illustrations, Gay & Hancock Ltd., London, nd. (c.1912).

Duodecimo; suede yapp covers, with illustrated endpapers, gilt spine title, and stamped upper board title and decoration; 80pp., top edge gilt, with a black and white frontispiece and 11 plates likewise. Previous owner’s ink inscription to the verso of the frontis.; wear to the cover edges with some minor loss; mild foxing confined mainly to the preliminaries; rear free endpaper has its lower corner missing. Good.

2 - Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Illustrated by Charles Robinson, Collins Clear-Type Press, London, nd.

Sextodecimo; suede yapp covers, with illustrated endpapers and gilt spine title; unpaginated (88pp.), with a tipped in full-colour frontispiece and title page and three plates likewise. An initial blank page excised; foxing to preliminaries; minor wear to the covers. Good.

3 - Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, W.P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, nd.

Duodecimo; suede yapp covers, with illustrated endpapers and gilt spine title; 80pp., all edges gilt, with a decorated title page. Retailer’s bookplate on front pastedown; light spotting to preliminaries. Very good.

4 – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: FitzGerald’s Translation with Notes; illustrated by Alice Ross, W.P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 1911.

Duodecimo; suede yapp covers, with illustrated endpapers, gilt spine title, and stamped upper board title and decoration; 62pp. [xxxipp. + 31pp.], top edge gilt, with a full-colour frontispiece. Spine split; previous owner’s pencil inscription to initial blank page; mild wear and sunning to the wrappers. Good.


Given that these small format printings were intended to be carried about in pockets or purses, it made sense to package them in sturdy bindings, such as suede or leather. The yapp binding, one where the wrapper is not stitched but is allowed to softly drape several millimetres beyond the edges of the text block, is uniquely suited to the small format since it requires no fiddly manipulation and is quick and cheap to produce. This does not mean that elaboration was not employed and there are many examples of gilt titling and embossed and coloured decoration. And of course, standard binding techniques were also employed:


1 - The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald, The Richards Press Ltd., London, 1943.

Sextodecimo; hardcover, with blind-stamped upper board design and gilt spine and upper board titling, with a red ribbon – torn, but still present; 96pp. Minor offset to the preliminaries; otherwise, very good.

2 - The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia, translated into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald (eighth edition), Methuen & Co. Ltd., Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 1920.

Sextodecimo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 96pp. Shaken; covers well-rubbed and worn; spine split in many places; previous owner’s ink inscription to the front free endpaper; minor offset to endpapers. Good.

Another factor which brought pressure to bear were the World Wars. Paper restrictions meant that publishers needed to be canny about what they produced and how they produced it. Smaller formats with soft covers – usually of cheap materials, sometimes identical to those which comprised the text block – were an easy way of maximising production whilst reducing costs.


The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Astronomer-Poet of Persia, translated into English by Edward FitzGerald, Gilmour’s Bookshops, Pty. Ltd., George Street, Sydney, NSW, Australia, nd. (c. 1943).

Duodecimo; paperback with staple-sewn printed yapp covers; 24pp. Previous owner’s ink inscription to the inside front cover along with the retailer’s ink stamp; minor foxing to preliminaries; Very good.

A feature of this mass-production – which may be unique to those editions produced in the southern hemisphere – is the wholesale pirating of designs and imagery from better-known versions of the work. Willy Pogany’s stylings, for example, show up again and again in these cheap reproductions – especially the font he created for his 1909 original version – and, despite the fact that it’s George Harrap & Co. that instigate most of these, it’s not always clear that the royalties, or credit, are being directed where they ought to be.


1 – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., High Holborn, London, 1957.

Duodecimo; hardcover, full red morocco, with gilt spine titling on a black label with gilt rules and decorations, a blind-stamped upper board, and marbled endpapers; 96pp., opened, top edge gilt, with a full-colour frontispiece and 8 plates likewise, along with many duochrome decorations and designs. Retailer’s bookplate to the front pastedown; previous owner’s ink inscription to the half-title; minor bumping to the corners and some light scraping to the boards. Very good.

2 – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., Parker Street, Kingsway, London, nd.

Duodecimo; hardcover, with upper board title and decoration; 96pp., with a full-colour, tipped-in frontispiece and 3 plates likewise, along with many duochrome decorations and designs. Slightly rolled; some softening to the spine extremities; retailer’s ink stamps to the front pastedown; offset to the endpapers; marginal notation in pencil throughout; mild scattered foxing throughout. Good.

3 – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., High Holborn, London, 1940.

Duodecimo; hardcover, with upper board titles and decorations; 96pp., with a full-colour, tipped-in frontispiece and 7 plates likewise, along with many duochrome decorations and designs. Slight softening to the spine extremities and mild corner-bumping; retailer’s bookplate to the front pastedown; previous owners’ ink inscriptions to the front free endpaper; faint scattered foxing throughout; some minor offset to the plates; text block edges lightly toned. Good.

4 – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; The Leisure Age Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd., Castlereagh Street, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 1946.

Duodecimo; hardcover, quarter-bound in printed card-stock boards with a cloth spine; 88pp., with a duochrome frontispiece and many red and black internal decorations. Shaken; top corners bumped and spine sunned and softened; retailer’s bookplate to the front pastedown; previous owner’s ink inscription to the front free endpaper; some old tape stained and minor surface tears to the pastedowns; text block edges toned and top edge dusted. Good.

This is not to say that there was a dearth of creativity abounding when it came to decorating copies of the Rubaiyat; it’s just that, ever since the days of Elihu Vedder, piracy has been part and parcel of the tale of this work. Despite Pogany’s designs and images being poached or re-used many times over and over (along with those of Gilbert James and René Bull) there were certainly many other illustrators and designers out there trying to leave their mark upon FitzGerald’s translation


1 - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Engravings by George Buday A.R.E., Frederick Muller Ltd., London, 1947.

Duodecimo; hardcover, in decorated papered boards with an upper board title on a white label and illustrated endpapers; 30pp., with many engraved illustrations. Somewhat rolled; boards well-ribbed and spine heel chipped. Good.

2 - The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia, A. & C. Black Ltd., London, 1930.

Octavo; hardcover, with upper board titles and decorations; 80pp., with a monochrome frontispiece and 11 plates likewise. Text block dished; softening to the spine head; a dark stain to the bottom of the upper board; text block edges toned. Very good

3 - Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, A Calendar for the Year 1912, Ernest Nister, London/E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, NY, USA/Angus & Robertson Ltd., Sydney, NSW, Australia; printed in Bavaria; 1912.

No. 2940 of a limited series: duodecimo; hardcover, in papered boards with upper board title and decorations, a illustrated endpapers; unpaginated [28pp.], each page bordered in red and blue with gilt decorations. Previous owner’s ink inscription to the verso of the front free endpaper; mild scattered foxing mainly confined to the preliminaries; some heavy bumps to the board corners and edges. Dustwrapper is heavily foxed and chipped, not affecting the titles; now protected by non-adhesive plastic film. Very good.

Perusing this list, one might come to think that the small Rubaiyat might have faded from view and become a thing of the past: not so. These days the term “gift book” no longer identifies a quarto-sized volume elaborately produced and decorated in time for Christmas; rather, it refers to those palm-sized catchpenny volumes that litter the area surrounding the cash registers at your local bookstore, with titles like “50 hilarious Cricket Jokes!” or “Amazing Photos of Things that Cats do when You’re not at Home!”. Here too, can be found copies of FitzGerald and Omar’s work, even with (despite the litigious times in which we live) some unacknowledged and re-used artwork (this time by René Bull):


The Little Book of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Vega/Chrysalis Books plc., London, 2002.

Sextodecimo; hardcover with illustrated boards; 48pp., decorated, with many full-colour illustrations throughout. Near fine.

I’m often asked what the smallest volume in my collection is and it’s the one at the top of this list, with the dimensions added. This is another early entry into my collection, gifted to me by a friend of my mother who discovered what my obsession was. It’s the smallest one I’ve seen to date, but there might be even teensier ones out there somewhere: the quest continues!


Friday 9 May 2014

Somerton Man...


The reach of history and connexions around the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is wide-ranging and diverse. In this instalment, I’d like to present an interesting event which seems a world away from the poem and its issues but which has a very strong link to the text: the Strange Case of Somerton Man.

This bizarre incident took place in Somerton a suburb of Adelaide in South Australia in November, 1948. A man was found dead on the beach there, fully dressed, having expired whilst apparently taking in the scenery. Passersby had noticed him earlier in the evening and had thought nothing of it, or had thought that maybe he was drunk; when it was observed that he’d lain in situ throughout the night and hadn’t apparently moved, examination determined him to be deceased. So much, so normal.

X Marks the spot where Somerton Man was found

Somerton Man (as he later became known) was in his early middle age. He was well-built, as if used to labouring or some other form of manual occupation, and he seemed to have been in good health. A striking feature was that he was extremely clean – freshly shaved, hair newly cut and with signs of having bathed shortly before his demise. Witnesses early the previous evening had said that they’d seen him to be smoking; a cigarette had been found dropped from his lips on to his lapel and this directed investigators to examine the man’s clothes. They too, were expensive and freshly cleaned, but with all cleaner’s marks, manufacturer’s details and owner’s labels neatly removed. It was also noted that he had no hat, a circumstance which, in those days, was highly unusual. To all intents and purposes, the man had bathed, put on his clean clothes and, hatless, walked down to the sand, finding a nice position against the seawall where he lit up a cigarette and then quietly died.

No-one knew where he had been staying; it seemed that he had just dropped out of the sky.


The police issued a photograph through the local media and took a full body cast of the man to aid in identification. Thereafter, the autopsy continued apace. The results were largely inconclusive: the man had eaten a decent meal up to four hours before dying (although stress or other factors could have delayed or accelerated digestion, so this time period is merely an educated guess) consisting of a vegetable pastie. His stomach and duodenum were irritated and coated with mucus, a sure sign of poison, but no conclusive agent was determined. A tentative means of death by “heart failure” was listed, although this too is a prevarication.

The local rumour-mill began to turn and many people decided that Somerton Man must have been an American, due to the fact that his clothes were so expensive and “high toned”. No absentee Yanks were revealed in the manhunt, however. Regardless, his fingerprints were taken and sent both to the FBI and to Scotland Yard: both agencies denied knowledge of the victim.

Eventually, the Adelaide police issued a directive for any hotels, railways, or other types of accommodation to declare the presence of any unclaimed baggage items. This turned up a suitcase which had been left at the nearby railway station on November the 30th, and which had not been recovered by its owner. The following items were discovered inside: a red-checked dressing-gown; red felt slippers, size 7; a shirt; a yellow coat shirt (that is, a shirt with an attached collar); a pair of light brown trousers with sand in the cuffs; four pairs of underwear; pyjamas; four pairs of socks; two ties; six handkerchiefs; a scarf; front and back collar studs; a shaving kit, with razor, strop and shaving brush; a toothbrush and toothpaste; a tin of brown Kiwi-brand shoe polish; a sewing repair kit; a button; a pair of scissors; a screwdriver; a cut down table knife; a stencilling brush; three pencils; sixpence in change; a cigarette lighter; eight large and one small envelopes; two airmail stickers; an eraser. The sewing repair kit in the suitcase contained an American brand of waxed thread which had been used to repair a small rip in Somerton Man’s coat pocket. Things seemed to be progressing.

Several items of clothing in the suitcase had identifying labels still on them with a name that could have been either “T. Kean”, or “T. Keane”. A bulletin was issued for anyone with knowledge of a person of this name to come forward. It turned out that a sailor named “T. Reade” was listed as missing, and excitement grew; it waned once more when T Reade’s workmates viewed the body and declared it to be not their man. Despite this setback, this series of events consolidated a belief amongst the investigating officers that Somerton Man was connected with the docks somehow: the stationery items in his case seemed to indicate that he habitually labelled items intended for shipping despatch. His apparent strength and good state of health helped underline this theory.

But, how does any of this apply to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? An initial search of the man’s clothing found a scrunched-up pill of paper in his watch-fob pocket. When unrolled, it proved to be a quarto-sized leaf torn from a book, with the words “Tamam Shud” printed upon it. As anyone familiar with the Rubaiyat can tell you, these are the last words of the poem as translated by FitzGerald, meaning “it is done”. Police began searching libraries and book shops trying to find a copy of the book with its last page torn out. Again, they publicised the development and again – miraculously – they got a result.

On July the 22nd in 1949, a fellow by the name of Ronald Francis came forward with the fact that he’d spotted a copy of the Rubaiyat in the glovebox of his (decidedly unpoetical) brother’s car. Following up this lead, the police found the book: according to Mr Francis’ brother, it had been tossed onto the back seat of his car through the open window after he’d left it parked on Moseley Street in Somerton, the road that ran along the stretch of beach above where the dead man had been found. Unable to account for its presence in his car, he’d thrown the book into the glovebox and forgotten about it.

Now things get interesting. On the rear pastedown of the book were two important pieces of information: a telephone number; and a series of letters in rows indicating that some working–out had taken place. Suddenly it appeared that the book in question was the key to some type of code. Things suddenly seemed sinister.


On the face of things, it seemed that Somerton Man and whoever he was known to, had some kind of book code operating. These codes require that both parties in the exchange have a copy of the same book; a three, or four-digit, sequence indicates the page, line, word and, if necessary, the letter required to decode the message. For example, if the paragraphs of this text were the code key to a secret message and the first word needed was “Somerton”, it would be encoded as “1.4.2” – first paragraph; fourth line; second word. Seemingly, the code in use was even more refined, signifying individual letters, and possibly with a cloaking algorithm to throw-off pursuit. However it worked, it remains undeciphered to this day.

These types of codes usually require that the book in question is one that is commonly found, usually a Bible or a dictionary of some kind. In this case, the book in question is not that common – at least, not any longer. It was the first printing of the poem by a New Zealand publishing company called Whitcombe & Tombs produced – according to Garrard (the latest Rubaiyat bibliography) in “194X”. Many publishing house were (and still are, but for different reasons lately) lacklustre in their efforts to date their offerings. All we can say about this version was that it was produced in the ‘40s sometime and reasonably before 1948. In later years, the company produced cheap versions in a paperback duodecimo format, possibly using variants of the page designs and artwork from the quarto original. I haven’t seen a copy of the larger version, but I do have a copy of the later small version:


FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Courage and Friendship Booklet series), n.d. (c.1944), Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., Christchurch, New Zealand.

Small folio; paperback, in illustrated gatefold yapp covers; 44pp.

Wrappers sunned; moderate edgewear; retailer’s stamp on the verso of the front free endpaper. Very good.


The discovery of the book and its possible use as a cipher key raised much discussion. Although newly released to the market, Whitcombe & Tombs’ quarto gift book would have been somewhat hard to track down and certainly more expensive than virtually any another easily-obtained work; given this, some people felt that the book-code possibility was too long a bow to draw. However, as we know, the question as to the rarity of the edition, and the ease by which two agents could find a copy to encode their missives, is somewhat of a moot point: as long as the two agents (if we can call them such) are using the same FitzGerald translation to encode and decode their messages, it doesn’t actually matter which published copy they used. And, as we know, the poem was positively ubiquitous in the public consciousness for the first half of last century.

(Some sources claim that the Whitcombe & Tombs edition found during the investigation was the first edition of FitzGerald’s translation and ponder endlessly as to 1) how Somerton Man could have obtained a copy of such a priceless work, and 2) why, subsequently, the Adelaide police would have carelessly disposed of such a valuable item after the case went cold. Of course, as we know, Bernard Quaritch published the first edition of FitzGerald’s first translation in 1859; the W&T New Zealand edition, was produced in the 1940s. I think we can safely remove this layer of bibliophilic frisson from the story.)

The unlisted telephone number, on the other hand, led police detectives to a nurse and single mother, moved to Adelaide from Sydney, named Teresa Powell, or Johnson. She lived at an address at Moseley Street in Glenelg, overlooking Somerton Beach, but claimed that she was not at home on November 30th 1948. She did mention however, that her neighbour had seen an unidentified man approach her door and try the bell, only to leave when there was no response. After being shown the body cast of Somerton Man, Teresa appeared to go into a sudden faint; after being revived however, she claimed not to have recognised the deceased. Strange behaviour for someone shown a plaster cast of someone she didn’t know, and especially for a nurse who, arguably, should be accustomed to seeing the dead, even a facsimile of one.

Teresa, after being asked about her copy of the Rubaiyat, said that she had had a copy, but that she gave it to someone named Alfred Boxall whilst living in Sydney. Police discovered Alf Boxall working as a maintenance mechanic for a bus company in Randwick; they also found the copy of the Rubaiyat which Teresa had given him, signed “Teresa Jestyn”, her maiden name: it was a 1924 Sydney edition, not from Whitcombe & Tombs.

Teresa had relocated from Sydney to Melbourne after falling pregnant. After giving birth, she moved once more to Adelaide, where she went by the surname “Powell”. She told police that she was about to get married to a man named Prestige Johnson and feared that her connexion to the Somerton Man case might cause such scandal as to squelch the wedding event. Accordingly, the police agreed to minimise mention of her details in the Press and to refer to her only as “Miss Jestyn” where mention was unavoidable. In this manner, Teresa slipped cleanly away from involvement in the case: later investigators almost unanimously agreed that Teresa certainly knew the identity of the mysterious body; however, if this was true, she kept that secret right up until her death in 2007.

Meantime, Somerton Man was buried at the taxpayer’s expense in a nearby cemetery and his anonymous grave marker can still be found there today.


The case is still unresolved. Many theories abound as to who the mystery man was: some believe that he was an American spy, working the docks for Communist infiltrators or perhaps monitoring British atomic testing in South Australia. Other believe that he had links to organised crime and was working some kind of smuggling deal from the US. I have my own personal thoughts on the issue:

Firstly, it’s likely, given the array of stationery items which he had in his suitcase, that he did work on the docks in some kind of Customs and Excise capacity, requiring him to make stencils and to mark the boxes and crates, the despatch of which he supervised. It’s possible that he was promoted up the line from a lower position and came from a background where his education would have been rudimentary at best. I think that the letters in the back of the book, quite apart from being a code, were simply his efforts at visualising particular letters prior to having to cut them out of stiff card in order to make stencils. He used the book because, being precious to him, he carried it with him everywhere. I presume that his new job had taken him to the US a few times and thus, the American thread in his sewing kit.

Secondly, the Rubaiyat which he carried was a gift; I believe it was a gift to him from a woman for whom he had a passionate regard. I think he went to Somerton that hot day, wearing his best gear, to confront her, in some kind of a grand gesture: he arrived, stowed his bag in the railway station nearby, found a bathhouse in which to spruce up, and then went to her house, hoping against all odds that his lover would feel as much for him as he did for her, that she would welcome him in and the rest of their lives would start from there. I think that the woman in question was Teresa Jestyn/Powell, soon to be Johnson, and that she deliberately left him hanging, arranging to not be at home when he showed up.

Rejected, he tossed away the cherished book which she had given him - as she seemed to do with all her boyfriends, a fairly common practise back then – by throwing it through the back window of a nearby parked car. Then, feeling as low as he ever thought he could possibly feel, he treated himself to a poisoned meal and then saw out his last day with a cigarette and an ocean view. In his pocket, a form of suicide note: a piece of paper with the pregnant words “it is over” printed upon it.

That’s my reading of it and from my perspective as an unofficial Rubaiyat “expert”, it works well, even down to the flash nightwear that this guy was packing. And it opens interesting speculation as to who was the father of Teresa's child...


The true story may well never be revealed. In the meantime, it still surfaces occasionally to tantalise and to get conspiracy theorists cogitating. Kerry Greenwood, writer of the Phryne Fisher detective novels, published her account of the enigma in December 2012 (Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery), but she is by no means the only writer of mysteries to have seen its allure. Stephen King stumbled across the story and was inspired to write The Colorado Kid, a gumshoe novel which uses the strange details of the dead body’s discovery to open a can of two-fisted action; interestingly, the US’s SyFy channel used his book as the basis for its supernatural TV show “Haven” (awful, awful, awful) showing the long reach that a literary mystery can generate.


For me it’s a sad tale of someone, a fellow Rubaiyat lover, who took the poem at its word and followed his heart, like so many others have done before him and since. Sometimes though, seizing the day doesn’t always provide us with the outcomes we wanted so badly, and I believe that Somerton Man wanted his happy ending a little too much and was too much of a romantic to soldier on without. Omar also tells us, remember, that there’s nothing new under the sun and that these things too, shall pass; moderation and acceptance in all things, perhaps, is the answer.



Postscript:

As of late November 2022, genetic research has determined that the Somerton Man was a Victorian resident in absentia named Carl "Charlie" Webb. Forensic examination, using hairs removed from the plaster cast that was taken of the corpse, along with some sleuthing through genealogical databases, has arrived at this conclusion; however, a forensic police examination is also underway - following an exhumation of the body - and its findings have not yet been reached. The odds are pretty good, though, it has to be said.

Apparently, Charlie was a bit suicidal and had fled to South Australia leaving an abandoned and abused wife who divorced him a few months after his death. He was otherwise friendless and preoccupied with poetry - especially the darker, brooding kind - and so the Rubaiyat was obviously striking a chord within him. In the wake of all this, I've read an interesting essay showing that the 'code' in the back of his copy of the book might well have been a mnemonic device to remember favoured passages, but the presence of "Miss Jestyn's" 'phone number there as well is still an open question.

Bibliographically, amongst collectors and fans, the quest to determine which of the Whitcombe & Tombs' editions of the poem it was that Webb was using, continues. The majority of the editions that these publishers produced were undated and so their vintage can only be determined using gift inscriptions within the books, associated newspaper advertisements and records of lodgments within public institutions (libraries, etc.). There are some pretty determined detectives on the case though, and no doubt a consensus will soon be reached!

Tuesday 22 April 2014

Cash...




XII.

“How sweet is mortal sovranty” – think some:
Others – “How blest the Paradise to come!”
Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the Rest;
Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!


Anyone who’s followed this blog for any length of time (and I haven’t been posting regularly, I know) will realise that I don’t have a lot of time for Robert Graves. At this point, with the pertinent reference to taking cash in the verse above, it seems an appropriate moment to discuss this.

Graves did some wonderful things in his career, there’s no denying: he gave us I, Claudius and Claudius the God and rendered the Greek Myths more or less comprehensible for generations of readers. He was one of the very few poets of the Great War to make it out alive, which is incredible enough; unfortunately, he seems to have developed some hang-ups in his early life which forced him into a bad decision in later years.

Graves was part of the generation of writers in the post-War era which included characters like W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh. Graves wrote and published alongside them and was considered their peer, at least in literary terms. After his war poetry, Graves dabbled in some other short works which were dramatically homoerotic (this, in a country where homosexuality was still, at least technically, illegal), unlike most of his other contemporaries who had taken the lesson of Oscar Wilde to heart and kept schtum. The reception of these works was cool, especially by the subject who inspired them, and Graves went into hiatus for awhile thereafter.

He returned to publishing having married and settled down and, presumably, having sorted out his sexual proclivities. Thereafter, he seems to have taken a violently dismissive stance against all homosexuals, a knee-jerk reaction which, on the face of it, seems to stem from not having been allowed to join the “cool kids” club all those years ago.

Graves was convinced that Omar Khayyam was gay; he was absolutely sure that Edward FitzGerald was, too. He violently opposed the publishing of FitzGerald’s translation and called him all kinds of hateful and pejorative things whenever the Rubaiyat came up in conversation. Unfortunately for him, his violent insistence on being taken on faith in this matter and his manic opposition to the poem on this basis, forced many people to reject his stance and embrace the poem even more strongly. For most, Graves’s antipathy was an idée fixe, and his rantings seemed to indicate that there was a problem of a personal nature involved, rather than an actual, critical issue with the writing.

But things were to get worse.

In 1967, a Persian student approached Graves with what he claimed was an authentic translation into English of a manuscript which pre-dated the Calcutta Ms. which FitzGerald had used as the basis of his poem. This fellow, Ali Shah, claimed that he and his brother (back in Persia) had discovered these verses and were keen to publish them in the West, thus restoring the primacy of Omar Khayyam by side-stepping the FitzGerald morass. Graves swooped in and embraced the project. He talked up the Shahs’ version to various publishers and soon there was a bidding war to see who would get to print it. Various manuscript extracts began to circle about, and money started to change hands, necessary – Ali Shah said – to keep his brother safe in his tumultuous home country and to ensure the recovery of the quatrains.

Robert Graves went ballistic: finally, he said, that old shirt-lifter FitzGerald was going to get his; at last the old pillow-biter was going to get what was coming to him! He lobbied hard to get people to pony up the cash for the project and interviewed widely with anyone who would offer his point of view the column inches he felt the matter deserved. Then, the embarrassment:

Ali Shah, the original verses and, more importantly, the money, vanished. Last seen heading back towards Persia, he and his brother vapourised into the ether, and were never heard of again. Graves was left holding the baby and the questions he was being targeted with were of a particularly uncomfortable variety: why weren’t copies made? Why didn’t he have the verses examined by an expert before crying “hallelujah!” from the rooftops? Why did he take the Shah brothers so immediately at face value?

Of course, it was all because they were telling him things that he wanted to hear. In time it was revealed that the quatrains were mainly obscure and abstruse versions of the original rubaiyat found in the Calcutta Ms., and not particularly original at all. That they had been composed within the Twentieth Century was also proven – on the basis of grammatical shifts and word usage – and the whole matter looked very black for Mr. Graves.

Initially, he went on the attack, claiming that any attempt to re-translate them into English was far better than clinging on to FitzGerald’s “homosexual” version; by way of demonstration, he re-worked some of the quatrains himself, but with less than stellar results. In the end, a volume of the translation did appear, probably in a bid by the publisher to try and recoup something out of the debacle, but the scandal had already queered the pitch (so to speak) and sales were lacklustre. Graves moved to Mallorca and stayed there, grumbling, until he died.


As I’ve tried to indicate in previous posts, the jury is still well-and-truly out in regard to the sexual tendencies of both Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam. On balance, there might be something to Graves’ claims, but nothing definitive. By stark contrast, there’s a whole lot that comes out of Graves’ own writing which indicates that he might be protesting too much.

In the final analysis, Graves’ claims are inconsequential. Nothing he came out with holds water; nothing was relevant to the literary work; and no attempt by him (or the Shahs) to ‘improve’ the poetry came close to attaining that goal. It was a case of two fraudsters making off with a fortune and one man’s inarticulate misdirected rage bringing about his own destruction. As to the sexual orientation of the authors, does any of it even matter?

Graves’ hang ups, nowadays, amount to little more than the music of an increasingly distant drum.