At the Green Goose, by D. B Wyndham Lewis (“not to be confused with the novelist Wyndham Lewis,” as nearly every biographical sketch notes), is an utterly throw-away book that you will either love or wonder why anyone would have published it.
It’s nothing more than a collections of absurd philosophico-academic monologues–or rather, monologues with occasional interruptions–by one Professor Silas Plodsnitch, “great poet, philosopher, and neo-Pantagruelist.” The professor walks into the Green Goose, orders a coffee, lights up his pipe, and begins to talk. His subject may be bees and bee-keepers, celebrity, matrimony, the works of Ethel Biggs Delaney (writer of stories for women’s magazines) or the Sitwells (Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell), but he veers off into other topics, carries on erratically, and then exits, usually without reaching a point.
“For three pence you can buy the index to the Estimates for Civil Services for the year ending March 31, which I have been looking through with some interest,” starts one of his lectures:
I calculate, after reading under the index letter I that every third man in these islands is an inspector of something or other–agriculture, aliens, alkali works, ancient monuments, audits, bankruptcy, canal boats, explosives, fisheries, inebriates, milk, mines, prisons, town planning–heaven knows what beside! This does not include, I suppose, the hordes of sub-inspectors, assistant inspectors, and pupil-inspectors (at present taking a correspondence course), nor yet the Inspector of Inspectors and his staff.
This leads to an imagined dialogue between a harried Inspector of Bankruptcy and an Inspector of Ancient Monuments, whose schedule is considerably more relaxed, which ends in one biting the other on the leg. Then he cuts abruptly into a meditation on the various ways of pronouncing the line, “Bring in the body,” which he’s recently read in a contemporary poem, and the various meanings one might take from them. After detours into a couple of more topics, he breaks off abruptly and marches out of the pub.
These pieces came from Lewis’ humorous column, Beachcomber, which he started writing for the Daily Express starting in 1919. Equally worth finding, if not quite so anarchic in style, are two collections of Lewis’ “Blue Moon” pieces from the column he wrote after switching over to the Daily Mail: (At the Sign of the Blue Moon
If you’re a fan of shaggy-dog tales, Tristram Shandy, Professor Irwin Corey, or Monty Python, you’ll find At the Green Goose well worth a read. If, however, you prefer to get from Point A to Point B by the shortest path, keep moving. Nothing to see here.
At the Green Goose is available on the Internet Archive.
I am reading Julia, a memoir compiled by Frances Partridge from writings by her friend Julia Strachey, and The Mourners by Mary Murry. Look for a new post on Ronald Fraser’s A Visit from Venus tomorrow.
The interview is only about 30 seconds. The documentary is an hour, and definitely worth a watch when you have the time. Can I ask? What are you Reading at the mo?
Sorry, but I don’t have time for that for the next week or so. For someone who maintains a website, I really don’t spend much time on the Internet.
Did you check out the docu & interview?
I’m glad to see there’s a few biographies of O’Brien. What I find completely puzzling is no biography of DBWLewis has been written. Any number of lesser talents have a clutch of books written about themselves. It’s nearly the same with the brilliant Beachcomber who, I think, has only one: a scraggy unauthorized book devoted to his Cambridge years, said to be more apocryphal than factual. DBWL & Beach were keenly kept eyes on by George Orwell. Not a bad honour, that!
No, but I’ll check it out now.
Have you watched Anthony Cronin’s Arena documentary, The Dublin Literary Renaissance, on You Tube? It’s about O’Brien, Behan & Kavanagh and it’s very good. Also, someone has put on YT some interview footage of O’Brien, again very good.
Thank you for those. Borges I know about and have looked at Labyrinths. Calvino I keep meaning to check. Beckett I’ve already started to sniff around. The other guy, I will look at. I agree about O’Brien. In the Third Pol, the pages about the construction of the miniature items getting smaller and smaller, to be beyond human capability was so perfectly written I felt queezy.
No one is quite like him, but you might enjoy the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, or Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, or Donald Barthelme’s stories (particularly the early ones), or Samuel Beckett.
Hello. Wish i knew about the site back then! It’s a great book. I’ve bought Poor Mouth & At Swim. Dalkey and his other stuff will come along when it’s pay day, next week. Who else could you recommend, please, similar to O’Brien, whether a one-book-man or prolific but known only to the few. It would be appreciated.
The Third Policeman was one of the very first books I featured on this site back in 2006: The Third Policeman.
Haha! I can’t believe I’ve never come across him, never heard him mentioned, until you. DBWL & Flann are my twin peaks. I’m reading the Third Policeman at the mo. How it could have been rejected makes me sick. Ross.WR2Y
Thirty years ago, he was grossly neglected, but I think his star is solidly fixed in the firmaments now.
Hi. I’d just like to give you a very warm thank you for mentioning Flann O’Brian. Because of that, his works (and it’s going to be every single page I can find) and himself are taken to my heart. Thanks again. Ross.
Hi. It’s fully beyond me why D.B.Wyndham Lewis has been neglected for his writings. Even in A.N.Wilson’s biog of Hilarious Belloc, Lewis has only a sentence about him hiding under a table. I love him!
Thanks for the tip!
The bipolar and wonderful Spike Milligan made the TV programme The World of Beachcomber, featuring Sir Michael Redgrave bringing his full thespian talent to bear on the Anthology of Huntingdonshire Cabmen, in the late 1960s. One of the lost treasures of television.
His first world war novel, The Barber of Putney, is another neglected book worth reading.