I can see from a till receipt I have left inside my copy of Literary Upshots by Richard Mallett (1951) that I bought it from the Hay Cinema Bookshop at 12: 49 on 17 March 2019 from Clerk 01. It cost £5, as shown in pencil on the fixed front endpaper, along with the bookseller’s code 18/41. I don’t know what that signifies: booksellers’ codes have their own algebraic mystery. The receipt shows I bought another book for £5 at the same time, one for £6 and one for £10. I have no record of what these were.
I was in Hay for a bookish weekend with friends. The Cinema Bookshop is in the old cinema, not a seller only of film books: in fact, it is one of the two very large bookshops in the town, along with Richard Booth’s. It is particularly good for vintage hardback fiction. At about ten to one we would usually be turning our thoughts to The Granary café, by the clock tower in the town centre, where in the glory days a staunch all-day vegetarian breakfast could be had amid the busy hubbub. No doubt we went there next.
The book drew my attention by its cover, uncredited (perhaps it is by Mallett himself) and also, looking inside, by the fact that it included a parody, shared with T S Eliot, of another then-famed verse dramatist, Christopher Fry. I was looking into Fry’s work, having found he was a friend of Charles Williams. The playlet features two characters, Charles Clutterbuck and Glamora Langdale-Carruthers, and is based on Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and Fry’s Venus Observed. They are bemused about whether they are in an Eliot play or a Fry play and try to find out by comparing their roles and dialogue to see whose style they most match, though noting it is difficult to tell them apart. This is a neat conceit and at four pages does not outstay its welcome.
The volume offers ‘twenty-nine examples of literary disrespect, from the sincerest form of flattery to the flattest form of sincerity.’ Another interest I had was in exactly who Mallett had chosen to imitate, showing which books and authors were sufficiently in vogue at the time for the reader to recognise them. ‘Most of the stuff,’ he says in his introduction, ‘appeared in Punch, between 1931 and 1950.’ Some are still notable today, such as Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Ivy Compton-Burnett and William Faulkner. (One thing he doesn’t try, which might have been fun, is work by one author in the style of another: a Hemingway story as portrayed by Compton-Burnett, say.)
Other choices certainly were notable then, but have fallen from favour, such as Charles Morgan (Sparkenbroke, 1936), or are now known mostly to those with a particular interest in the period, such as Nigel Balchin (Lord, I Was Afraid, 1947) and F.L. Green (Clouds in the Wind, 1950). I happened to have been exploring a few of Green’s books, and Mallett unerringly homes in on their attempt to combine tension and a pursuit theme with literary significance: ‘You want it both ways, Frank!’ (his shady character is addressing the author as if he were a character in one of his own books), ‘You want your novel to be a thriller, Frank! You want them to buy it for the films! But you want it to stay deep and subtle. It’s got to be psychological too!’ It’s not an unfair depiction of Green’s novels, but it also neatly positions him, roughly in Graham Greene terrain.
On the whole, literary parodies, I find, are never quite so funny as they think they are, latching on to obvious mannerisms from their targets and parading these for all they’re worth. But Mallett is rather better than that, and his satire is perceptive, precise and imaginative. Some of his sketches are quite adventurous in themselves, indulging several times (as with the Eliot-Fry and Green pieces) in what is now known as meta-fiction, with characters commenting on, engaging with, and shaping the play or fiction they are in. There is also a very brisk and facetious send-up of Cold War spy fiction which skewers all the cliches of the form, featuring staunch secret agent Panther Piedish and his Central European nemesis Russell Sprautz.
Mallett also offers quite a varied selection: one of the pieces, ‘Another Association Catalogue’, enjoyably sends up a booklist by Elkin Mathews of signed and dedicated copies, in this case often to reluctant recipients, while there are also five inventive reports from school speech days, featuring illustrious guests such as Sir Charles MacScooter and the Archbishop of the Atlantic, and their eccentricities.
Richard Mallett was the author of four books of literary parodies: Watson's Revenge: Five Sketches from Punch, in which the Great Detective Takes His Knocks and J. Smith Strikes a Blow for Watsons Everywhere, first published in Punch 1934-35, and collected and reprinted in 1974; Doggerel’s Dictionary (1946); Amos Intolerable: His Table Talk (1948); and this volume, Literary Upshots, Or, Split Reading (1951).
Who’s Who listed him as Richard Mallett (3 April 1910-29 Nov 1972), Punch film critic from 1938, educated at Lowestoft Secondary School (Suffolk), and gives brief details of his career: he was a contributor to Punch from 1928 (aged 18, so very early) and on the editorial staff from 1937; also on the Evening News from 1931–1934. His recreation was sketching, his club the Savage, and his address at 103 Clifford’s Inn, London EC4A 1BX. Even allowing for the directory’s habitually terse style, it is a fairly impersonal entry. But Literary Upshots gives a good portrait of a brimming, inventive wit whose humour must have been informed by sharp, and perhaps not wholly unsympathetic, literary insight. It is a shame this enjoyable volume of skilful parodies seems rather lost to view.
(Mark Valentine)
