The Stretchford Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
THE STRETCHFORD CHRONICLES: 25 YEARS OF PETER SIMPLE Michael Wharton with an introduction by Kingsley Amis The Daily Telegraph Press/6.75 pounds ($16.20) Aram Bakshian, Jr. I have long suspected...
...Her own interests were mainly in dog-breeding, ballistics and light engineering...
...No less a humorist than Mark Twain seems to have agreed with me...
...As he spoke he danced brilliantly up and down, occasionally hacking at the furniture with an axe or setting his desk on fire in a frenzy of compassionate hatred...
...But there is precious little else...
...The best of it is now available in The Stretchford Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple, orderable from international booksellers or directly from the Daily Telegraph in London...
...since Chaucer's day it has been unsurpassed as a humorous literary medium...
...Then there is Simple's archetypical clerical trendy-a sort all too familiar on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years-the Reverend Doctor Space-ley-Trellis, "go-ahead Bishop of Bev-indon," whose grovelling before the cult of left-wing youth goes so far that he castigates God Himself for being "out of touch with current trends...
...It makes me sick...
...Tom Wolfe comes much closer with his precise razor wit and one R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s rollicking ful-minations in the pages of this journal and the Washington Post are almost always apt and well-aimed...
...One highlight is a daring scene where Mozart, as a sexually precocious child prodigy, is dandled on the knee of Marie Antoinette, or Maria Theresa, or Catherine the Great or somebody...
...O'Gourke explained that "she was conducting an independent survey of the contents of Nadirco pork pies...
...The variety is rich...
...Even in his wildest flights, however, Simple usually has a point to make, often aimed at some aspect of modern man's loss of soul or at his blind faith in technology and social progress...
...The fourth Bronte, whose name, Birdbath tells us, was Doreen, "had little in common with he sisters...
...One friend of hers had recently found a hairnet, a part of an alarm-clock and what seemed to be the incisor-tooth of a badger...
...his loyalties are entirely on the side of traditional morality and values more durable nan coils, contraceptives, mass marketing, and self-indulgent "humanism" run amok...
...Sometimes Simple is simply zany, as in his report on Nerdley housewife Brenda O'Gourke, 46, of Termite Road, and her quixotic encounter with 51 pork pies at the Nadirco Fooderama, Nerdley's premier purveyor of processed junk food, a pet hate of Simple's...
...It is not going to be quite like that after all...
...And when you see my film it'll make you a lot sicker," . . . Ron Fussell, the brilliant producer, was talking of his new film about the life and work of Mozart...
...Trendy cinematic monstrosities of the Ken Russell variety come in for harsher handling, as in this mock interview: "What did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart do in the struggle for social justice in feudal, class-ridden 18th century Austria, even then ripe for take-over by the Nazis...
...Pursued into the bedroom by experts brandishing pills and coils of ever new design, questioning them about their attitudes to each other, observing their love-making like any scientific process . . . they will find that they have exchanged one system of restraint, moral, religious, instinctual, for another system, social, secular, rational...
...My own theory is that, shortly after we became the leading free world power toward the end of World War II many of us began to take ourselves a bit too seriously...
...I'll tell you...
...But while this remains true in England, something has gone wrong in America...
...another found a long, rambling letter, possibly an appeal for help from someone who had been at one time imprisoned in the pie, for what reason she could not say...
...The fault, I suspect, lies not in our language but in ourselves...
...If Peter Simple sometimes seems but a hairsbreadth away from looniness, he is a great deal less deranged than the grotesque modern world around him and, to quote a characteristic Simplism: "In the country of the bald the one-haired man is king...
...There was no knowing what you might find in them nowadays...
...Equal parts Lewis Carroll, Dean Swift, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and P.G.Wodehouse, the worthy Simple (whose real name is Michael Wharton) has created a brilliantly eccentric gallery of characters-politicians, bureaucrats, trendies, freaks of the literary, academic, and theatrical worlds, pop psychologists, left-wing social scientists, and other charlatans-to populate his own fie -tive field forever English, the imaginary communites of Stretchford and Nerdley, nurseries for what Kingsley Amis has rightly called "some of the funniest writing of our time...
...Though dandling is not exactly the word for it," chuckled Ron...
...each of Simple's four-a-week columns includes several individual items ranging from boorish advice to the lovelorn dispensed by the bombastic Clare Howitzer to mind-boggling tidbits such as the discovery of a fourth Bronte sister by Simple's stock literary hack, author-critic Julian Birdbath...
...What did he do to fight against the evils of organized religion...
...She was a brisk, bouncing woman whose insistence on keeping all the windows of Haworth Parsonage open may have contributed to their early deaths...
...Since Mencken's departure, however, most of our topical and political humor has turned anemic...
...What did he do to protest against the racialist horrprs of the slave trade...
...Fussell makes no secret of his determination, at whatever cost-actually he's getting a special producer's fee of 150,000 pounds-to "shock viewers out of their complacency and make these wretched, boring little suburban shopkeepers sit up...
...When questioned, Mrs...
...At times his enthusiasm carries him too far, but just when one is about to write him off as a misanthropic right-wing crank, the old humor bubbles up to the surface again...
...The best American example in this century was probably H.L...
...thank God for England and Peter Simple, for 25 years and over four million words now, the outrageously funny and occasionally profound "Way of the World" columnist for London's venerable Daily Telegraph...
...His attitudes on such vital matters as housing, censorship, the sexual revolution, drug addiction, the environment and, above all, the Women's Liberation Movement have been unsatisfactory to say the least...
...Thus the best and most forceful topical humor usually comes from writers angry or aggrieved at the way things are going, whether what they yearn for is a return to lost orthodoxies or a departure into fresh heresies...
...At one time he even worked for a reactionary clergyman, the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg-later, needless to say, one of Hitler's favorite haunts...
...He just spent his time writing music and sucking up to the crowned heads of Europe...
...Consider this rather poignant aside following a swipe at sexologists and the birth control lobby: Poor young people, who thought they were going to be free to enjoy a pagan world of love and pleasure where moral restraints had vanished and all might do as they pleased...
...Mencken who lived long enough to lambaste both the petty bourgeois crassness of pre-Depression America and the collectivist, levelling excesses of the centralized welfare state...
...In his own words, the film will really "put the boot in...
...Altogether he [God] is far too preoccupied with outmoded eternal matters- often tinged with elitism...
...Simple makes no bones about it...
...The funny bone of the liberal cultural and political establishment atrophied...
...Spaceley-Trellis concludes, that God "retired and made way for a younger man...
...The predictably plastic inanities of Art Buchwald and the genteel tittering of Russell Baker seldom register strongly as either entertainment or social commentary...
...I have long suspected that most economic writers are broke, most pornographers are impotent, and most humorists suffer from chronic bouts of spleen and melancholy...
...English is one of the world's richest tongues for comic invective...
...An excellent book for dipping into at poolside, bedside, or deskside, and a pleasant reminder that English humor has survived even the dreariness of post-war socialism.of post-war socialism...
...The secret source of Humor itself," he wrote, "is not joy but sorrow...
...All of them choose their subjects more from frustration than inspiration...
...It is high time, Dr...
...Nothing...
Vol. 14 • April 1981 • No. 4
