Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study
Nollson, John
"Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study" criers, planners, and problem-solvers of all sorts, for they are also the crisis-mongers, just like those doctors forever urging you to get a check-up. These people should be watched, kept in...
...stand Pall...
...Pound was taken aback, but remained good humored...
...From his small shop at number 24 on the Rue Saint Jacques, not far from the University of Paris, in the Quarrier Latin, on the Rive Gauche, Linnaeus Nollson delivered his carefully-cultivated flowers to everyone who was anyone in the Parisian cu)tural community of the 1920s...
...It was all perfectly reasonable, and I decided that I would no longer pay attention to those backbiters who kept insisting that Ezra was a bit odd...
...As such, he was one of the lesser-known, but most important, figures of the Lost Generation...
...Pound agreed...
...Ezra The objective correlative of the order book, the Linnaeus Nollson diaries, having been completely deciphered, I can now reproduce in full the entry for March 13, 1925: As for the pornographic doggerel that I finally had translated, at first I could make neither head nor tail of it till, realizing that it was written in Pall, the ancient language of the Hinayana Buddhist scriptures, I hastened to Professor Lapleur of the Sorbonne, who rendered it quite easily into English...
...You bet your sweet ais," I shot back...
...Liberals must be made to see, if they do not already, that to have good intentions in this world is not enough...
...Of course, I have not yet decided whether to publish everything I know, since it's best to keep you guessing...
...It is the one that reads: O yais, 'Tis nais, On a dais, With Thais...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Alternative...
...Even though great uncle Linnaeus bad delivered flowers to Alice B. Toklas, and knew a thing or two about what went on in her house, he still believed in drawing the line somewhere...
...It is the prerogative of the individual, the church, the small family farm...
...In retro...
...Thinking gives me migraines and I get lower back pains when I have to read...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has accepted a staff position with the House Ethics Committee, but be has graciously consented to continue advising American statesmen in these times of troubles...
...Of a sudden, I realized that young Pound, alone among the poets of the city, had sufficient command of Pali to proposition my wife in that obscure and cryptic, albeit holy, language...
...Imagine my surprise, therefore, when just this past summer I stumbled upon the Linnaeus Nollson Papers behind an old cabinet in the herbarium of the National Botanical Garden...
...Nor does the poem fit the poet's development as we know it...
...The words can be of any length, just so the memo has only three words--and not much punctuation, either...
...To me, when the federal government begins to save money it is just another example of big government sticking its nose into another area of the citizens' lives where government just ought not to go...
...In those days, one had to assume that any mention of the penuk contravened the unwritten laws of polite society...
...Pound paled visibly...
...She entered the family by marrying Linnaeus Nollson, my grandfather's brother, that is, my great uncle...
...There you have it, an authentic slice of life, as life was really lived in one of those truly seminal epochs in cultural history...
...These people should be watched, kept in sight, suspected of the worst motives...
...Pound scribbled hurriedly: Too bad...
...I discuss the significance of this in my article in the next issue of PMLA...
...Uncle Timaeus became quite a mover--even a bit notorious...
...He was also a florist...
...Now if the government moves into this area I just do not see how the tittle fellow is ever going to compete...
...Plunkitt: Since I became American Ambassador to the UN an ugly rumor has been circulating which I wish to get out in the open, to wit, the rumor that I am not very intelligent...
...spect, it is clear that great uncle Linnaeus was proof of the hypothesis developed at Duke University--that one's name has great influence on the course of one's life...
...In cases where it is not, it will nevertheless serve the salutary function of warning liberals that they tend automatically to be viewed as a menace to the community, and that the untoward outcome of any of their pet projects will no longer be indulgently waved aside as a miscalculated good intention...
...The well-known poem by e e cummings - - o r is it w h auden, or is it Ogden Nash?-has long puzzled literary historians...
...I now know, for example, who sent those two dozen petunias to Alice B. Toklas on April 14, 1924...
...Dear Dr...
...For now, I will whet your appetite and share with you one profound insight into the creative process--an important episode which would have remained forever unknown bad I not made my fortuitous fred...
...Why, she'll probably kick your butt half way to the Bois du Boulogne...
...nor do such intentions serve to distinguish liberals from'others, such as the advocates of "special-interests" and corporate interests, or distemperridden conservatives...
...Well," I continued, pressing my psychological advantage, "what do you plan to do about this...
...If modern experience has shown us nothing else it is that governments can best be used for spending, not for saving...
...Accordingly, he persuaded Timaeus to abandon the study of Plato...
...Great uncle Linnaeus remained a Platonist to the end of his days...
...In fact, what is surely the original manuscript is preserved between two pages of great uncle Linnaeus' order book for March of 1925...
...With a tweak of the nose, I now must dispose, Of each sensuous rose, Cause your husband now knows, That's how it goes...
...Uncle Timaeus No//son, carrying on a family tradition, was also much influenced by his name...
...I may be able to publish as many as eleven...
...He became a classicist and read all the Platonic dialgoues in the original Greek...
...John No//son Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study Winning the Pulitzer Prize for literary studies is no easy task...
...But what else do you notice...
...O'Neill: I could not agree with you more...
...Eat your heart out, R.W.B...
...Pound was now ashen...
...Plunkitt: The President's decision to call off production of the B-1 bomber has caused considerable consternation with a large number of my colleagues on Capitol Hill who take it as an ominous sign...
...The Linnaeus Nollson Archive, now kept in the rare leaf room of the National Arboretum (where humidity and temperature can be mechanically controlled), contains material enough for at least eight monographs...
...Candor...
...It hearkens to the horse and buggy conceptualization of government so prevalent among the opposition...
...The best way to drive this point home might be, as I have suggested, to presume the existence of a self-interested motive behind all such crisis-mongering and postulating of injustice...
...Accordingly, I confronted him when he came to the shop to pay for the roses he had ordered...
...Great uncle Linnaeus considered this something of an improvement, but it fell to great aunt Anais to set Timaeus straight...
...And I guess I had better rewrite the poem too...
...GWP Dear Dr...
...The President based his decision on the worst possible grounds, saving money...
...Look, read anything I've said in the last few years--not very smart, obviously...
...Sincerely yours, Thomas P. O'Neill Speaker of the House Dear Mr...
...But wait...
...Indeed, Farrel Mangrate of Toronto, North America's leading authority on quatrains, argues for this alternative reading of the rather cramped handwriting of the original m s . Still, we have a right to remain puzzled...
...Having been named after the great botanist who discovered the curious fact that all plants, without exception, have two Latin names, great uncle Linnaeus was himself a botanist...
...If the President really wants to balance the budget he needs to take a tough-minded approach to the vested interests...
...The writing on one side of the card is unintelligible, but the other side of the card reads plainly: My dearest Anais, I know you're not pious, But are a woman of spais, So let's get under the dais, For some vais...
...I had once heard my parents discuss the fact that great aunt Anais was far in advance of her time on sexual subjects...
...During this symbolist phase of his career, we would surely have expected him to write: How nais, Is vais, Under a dais, With Thais...
...Timaeus agreed, and took up the canon law...
...Lapleur's translation, written in his own hand, is on the back of the original Pall text...
...I told Pound that I had half a mind to tell Alice B. Toklas about his interest in Anais...
...In a word, it is time for conservatives to take the offensive...
...He will, in a word~ have to adhere to the politics of people, eschewing the politics of non-people...
...The Thais known m history is not necessarily the kind of person with whom one would want to share a dais...
...In most cases, of course, such cynicism will prove to be well justified...
...He complimented me on my ability to under...
...TII publish the verse next month, and if anyone ever asks who Thais is, I'll just say it's my Burmese cat...
...This explains why he and Anais named their first son Timaeus, after the fellow in the Platonic dialogue...
...The poem is written on a small card clearly meant to accompany two dozen red roses that the poet bad ordered to be sent to none other than my great aunt Anais...
...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 It'll sure be nais...
...Great aunt Anais was not a Nollson by birth, yet she never used her maiden name...
...all Paris knew that Alice desired Anais with a passion that only unrequited love could nurture...
...Saving money is simply not a proper function of the federal government...
...No," I said, "she'll just think it's another mash note from Gertrude Stein...
...real estate, by any chance...
...Yet, so far as I know, I am the fast serious literary historian to make use of the Linnaeus Nollson Papers...
...I will make you wait for my new book to find out everything I discovered there...
...I guess I had better cancel the order for the flowers," Pound said sheepishly...
...Beat the hell out of you...
...He begged me for silence since, as he put it: "If Alice ever finds out, she'll beat the hell out of me...
...Let there be commerce between us," he said...
...I guess it's not nais to plot vais, not once, but twais," he moaned...
...Since I could have been no more than seven when she told me this, I could do nothing but giggle...
...That Washington editor so enthusiastic about the expansion of government programs--is he speculating in D.C...
...My own father, a respected and prosperous orthodontist, seldom spoke about them...
...If we transpose but two words in the original Pali text and recast the third line, we shall have produced a perfectly presentable poem...
...Well, of course, it's true...
...How many times did he tell me --though always omitting the details: "John, your great aunt Anais was one helluva gal...
...THE BOOTBLACK STAND Dr...
...Of course, we all want to balance the budget, but one does not balance a budget as complicated as that of the United States government just by refusing to spend public monies...
...You get to write your erotic verse and I get to save my wife's reputation...
...I've always been intrigued by this branch of my family...
...Clearly, this is a curious verse...
...predictably, he became celibate...
...Still, I was very put out...
...I am very open...
...I am almost knee-jerk open: To me The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 27...
...The Linnaeus Nollson Archive sheds a good deal of light on this mystery...
...The American people should not be enslaved by the iron will of some far-off accountant of whose life we know nothing...
...You use the diaeresis only if you think I'm like the iin naive," she would chuckle, "otherwise, just remember to put the emphasis on the penult...
...You're a louse, if you'll carouse, with another man's spouse...
...Lewis...
...Saving money is the citizens' God-given right...
...I've asked my staff to boil all State Department documents down to three words...
...To this day, he insists that his conversation about the birds and the bees with great aunt Anais changed his life...
...It is bad economics and worse economics...
...Balancing the budget is a people issue...
...I said heatedly...
...Predictably, he became a homosexual...
...I'm not...
...It begins with the fact that my great aunt was the well-known poet, Anais Nollson...
...The thing I most remember about my great aunt, Anais, was that I could never remember whether there was a wbat's-it with two dots over the i in her name...
...I sneered...
...Consider the following complex history of my recent emergence as prominent literary critic...
Vol. 10 • August 1977 • No. 10
