I
shall not need chastity in heaven,
For I shall be with Oliver
Thynne,
And alternando we shall go
In and out and out and in.
Maurice Bowra’s notoriously scabrous satirical poems on his
contemporaries have long been the subject of gossip, mostly based on
glimpses of small specimens. John Sparrow, Warden of Oxford’s All Souls
College, said of his friend: ‘his prose was unreadable and his verse
was unprintable’. And unprinted it has largely remained, though Bowra
did give occasional after-dinner readings to carefully chosen friends.
Now at last the time has come to make these wonderful poems public.
Enormously learned, brilliantly versified, exhilaratingly witty,
unashamedly lewd and scurrilous, these soaring fantasies about his
friends and enemies, based on the very slimmest of facts, are
masterpieces of their genre. They will immediately take their place in
the canon of the thinking person’s light verse.
This edition has its roots in a plan formed by Isaiah Berlin and John
Sparrow to explain the many allusions the poems contain – allusions
that are becoming increasingly obscure as time goes by. Unfortunately,
the necessary editorial work was scarcely begun in their lifetimes. Now
it has been completed, and the sometimes esoteric cast of characters is
identified and put in context. This leaves the reader free to luxuriate
in the virtuosity of Bowra’s acid pen.
The playwright Julian Mitchell, as an undergraduate at Wadham College
in the 1950s, came to know the author well during Bowra’s long
Wardenship, and provides a perceptive introduction to this long hidden
department of his œuvre – one which, some think, may well be remembered
for longer than his more ‘serious’ works.
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