Assorted Prose Read Free Page A

in spite of all—because the rumor is they’re going to change the postal zones again and in that case you’ll never be able to find me, by mail or otherwise.
    Olive Depositor looked at me funny the other day along Shady Lane, down by the Golden Mean Drug Store. I don’t suppose you’ve been breathing a word to her. Oh no Henry. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth as they say.
    You’re playing a cagey game, all right, and if you can pull it off, more power to you. Otherwise, I recommend you pack your cardboard suitcase and leave Anywhere and go back to Elsewhere, where you came from. We have twenty Henry Smiths in town already, and one more or less won’t make much, I mean
no
difference.
    With your best interests at heart,
R.C.J.

  WHAT IS A RHYME? *
    (T. S. Eliot, with Customary Equanimity, Confronts Mother Goose)
    I DO NOT KNOW whether all childhoods are painful. My own, or that drastically edited set of snapshots which is all that remains to me of my own, did (or does) not seem especially so. There is, for example, a beard, attached to one of my grandmother’s brothers and perhaps more spade-shaped than not, the contemplation of which seldom failed to inspire me as a child with an indeterminate ‘enthusiasm’; any attempt on my part further to particularize this emotion would no more serve my present purpose than an attempt by Shakespeare to acquaint his Elizabethan audience with the details of Othello’s fascinating travels as thoroughly as Desdemona had been acquainted with them would have served his dramatic, and different, purpose. It is enough, I think, to be aware that such ‘enthusiasm’
somewhere
exists. To allay the suspicion that by invoking the shade of my great-uncle’s beard and whatever attendant ectoplasm,
inops inhumataque
, its wake includes, I have so far abused your hospitality as to appoint you my partners in the type of séance that is best conducted, if at all, in the privacy of one’s flat, it should at the outset be made clear that as I understand the question, ‘What is a rhyme?’ (and the most zealous attempt to provide answers is necessarily stopped short, like Virgil at the rim of Paradise, at the limits of one’s comprehension of what has been asked), it is to an extent inseparable from another: ‘What is a child?’ Ias well wish to affirm that it is not part of my purpose to inspect
all
dictionary senses of the word ‘rhyme,’ or to decide for once and all if ‘fade’
rhymes
with ‘said’ or ‘said’ with ‘hedge.’ The vexing issue of
genres
we shall also skirt. It shall be assumed that a riddle, however ingenious, is not a ‘rhyme,’ and neither is an epic, even one which jingles—as does, to my ear,
The Curse of Kehama
.
    When we read such lines as
    Diddlty, diddlty, dumpty,
    The cat ran up the plum tree, 1
    we must inquire of ourselves not only ‘What is our response?’ but also ‘Is it
right
to respond in such a way?’ For the responses of a child are not those of a mature person. You will readily perceive that I have presupposed something which more properly might be phrased as yet another question: ‘Were “rhymes”
in fact
composed for “children”?’ Here we discover, with mixed apprehension and delight, that we have placed at least the forepart of one foot into the bustling and comforting realm of textual scholarship, whose inhabitants produce a highly valuable form of literary baggage which I have previously determined, however, to make this trip without. For our purpose I believe it is sufficient to say that if ‘rhymes’ are
not
intended for ‘children,’ they appear to be failures, whose only interest for the adult can lie in somewhat morbid concern with
how far
such efforts are situated beyond the pale of those canons of judgment which—by their subversion as well as in their advocacy—have shaped the European, that is to say, the Christian, tradition.
    I confess that when I come upon lines such as those quoted my reaction is