The Birmingham Quean: notespop04

21.1 he’s like [etc]:* It is difficult to tell whether this is a simile or a sloppily expressed statement of fact. In any event ‘like / psych / hike’ is an extremely overworked rhyme. If I am to continue with the argument that this poetry is deliberately, satirically bad, however, I might do so by inferring that the future world it attempts to portray is so acutely ersatz that it is no longer necessary (or even possible) to differentiate between a truth-conditional statement and a simile.

21.3 psych:* As a monosyllabic verb, this is a term used in Bridge to refer, I think, to bluffs in the bidding process whereby one attempts to make the opposition believe a partner’s genuine bid is phoney, or vice versa. It strikes me that the poet might be a card player; but I have neither the expertise nor the patience with the tedious reference material to back this notion up with any serious analysis. Suffice to say, it is a matter of common knowledge that the vagrant confidence trickster begins his education by learning Find the Lady, in which the card you think is the Queen invariably turns out to be a lowly number card.
Presumably, we are to understand that Mercator’s unscrupulous business competitors are attempting to force him out of business with a ‘price war’ or ‘bidding war’ in which they combine their knowledge and resources and thereby give a false impression of their economic position in relation to his own. The occasional intimations of extra-sensory perception in the poem—which suggest psych might carry some rather more fantastic sense of telepathic attack using magical powers (such as those supposedly possessed by Aleister Crowley)—are, I trust, insufficient to support such a reading. It is not so difficult to imagine a businessman driven to suicide by economic failure that one would require a psychic explanation for the severity of his melancholy, I hope.

21.5 hike:* American slang, meaning to drastically raise the price of something.

21.7-8 probity… nobody:* This rhyme relies on a lazy American pronunciation of the first word with a voiced, rather than an unvoiced, alveolar plosive as the penultimate consonant. The ongoing Brummagem/American deterioration of the pronunciation of the Queen’s English is not, it seems, exclusive to the vowels.

22.3 brinkmanship:* Perhaps Brinkman is supposed to be the name of some paper tiger of a future money-lender: one whose bark is much worse than his bite. Brinkmanship could therefore mean something like Faux-Shylockism. The poem contains many of these unexplained bits of jargon, something which actually makes it quite superior to humdrum Science Fiction, avoiding as it does that dreary tendency to give laboriously precise explanations of every new bit of futuristic terminology.

22.5 cards:* One can only guess this to be a reference to some system of keeping accounts of debit and credit using something analogous to today’s ‘index cards’ which can (in this almost entirely unregulated market) be used as a kind of currency: a chaotic system of transferable IOUs that allow everybody to behave as if they were a bank. To ‘freeze’ an individual’s ability to carry out such transactions might therefore be the definitive act of bankruptcy.
(This idea—that, eventually, every man will be his own bank—is no doubt the ultimate dream of puritan capitalism. Birmingham was the birthplace of many of the modern financial institutions of Great Britain: most notably Lloyds Bank. Wise and Johnson (1950: p.176) are explicit about the origins of these activities in C17^th forges: ‘Many ironmongers acted as moneylenders and from this practice emerged… the importance of Birmingham as an early centre of banking.’ We can safely read ironmongers as a euphemism for ‘coiners.’)
It is impossible to ignore the continuing implications made of a possible reading of this poem as an encoded game of cards, however. It is not as obvious here as in Lewis Carroll, but one cannot fail to notice how the poem seems to follow a pattern similar to that of a hand of whist: the final scene being the final trick in which the Queen (Britannia) trumps the King of a lesser suit (Sloggy) to win the pot.

23.3 Diazepam:* These ‘sleeping pills’ which Mercator takes seem to be illicit narcotics rather than prescription drugs; or perhaps the distinction no longer exists in this lawless world of unregulated marketeering. ‘Diazepam’ would appear to be a slang name derived from bastardized Turkish: azap meaning ‘pain’ and amme meaning ‘all’; the whole coinage (di-azap-amme) meaning ‘against all pain.’ Turkey is notoriously the source of much of the illegal trade in opium in Europe, the strongest preparation of which in contemporary chemistry is called ‘heroin’. This word, according to the OED addenda, is ‘said to be so derived [from hero] because of the inflation of the personality consequent upon taking the drug.’ Perhaps this is the source of the alternative (quasi scientific) name here: ‘Valium.’ In Turkish a ‘Vali’ is a petty potentate whose title can no doubt trace its etymology to the Latin valēre ‘to be strong’. The possibility exists, of course, that this root of strength (validus) simply reveals the name to be a coinage which makes reference to the potency of the preparation of opium rather than any bolstering effect upon the user. Mercator, at least, is in no way empowered by its effect; quite the opposite.
Crucially, this recalls a possible pun on ‘heroine’ in stanza 1. To gloss the opening clause as ‘I want a dose of heroin’ would certainly be consistent with the poet’s reversal of Byron’s witty flip from desire to lack. It is certainly structurally worthwhile for the poet to remind the reader of this opening craving just before the appearance, in a drug-induced hallucination, of the anti-heroine narrator whose depraved influence is to be resisted just like that of the homophonic opiate.
For my part, I would remind the reader of Canto V of Don Juan where Byron’s hero is dressed as a concubine in a Turkish harem at the orders of the Sultana. Despite the opening parody of Canto I, it is this fifth Canto which the poet is most influenced by here. Byron directly alludes to Milton’s Satan when describing the Sultana. The poet hints that the reader should struggle against the influence of his counterfeit heroine just as Byron has Juan (himself reluctantly dressed in drag) resist the Circean charms of the Sultana:

23.3 several:* era 4

24.2 Valium:* See 23.3 Diazepam.*

24.7 plonks:* An onomatopoeic verb. We are, I think, intended to hear the sound as if inside (as well as from) Mercator’s own skull as his face hits the floor. This is therefore the moment at which we pass from watching him as if standing ‘upon the ceiling’ to inhabiting his perspective as the ‘doped’ narratee (see 15.2 dope) of the rest of the canto.

24.7 lino-tile:* ‘Lino’, according to the OED addenda, is an abbreviation of ‘linoleum’ ‘[f. L. linum flax + oleum oil.] A kind of floor-cloth made by coating canvas with a preparation of oxidized linseed-oil.’ It is possible the linoleum is itself cut into tiles which are stuck to the floor with an adhesive. Considering the theme of tawdry imitation which pervades the poem, however, it seems much more likely to be that type of rolled linoleum printed with a design that (entirely unconvincingly) mimics marble tiles. That this should also tend to leave an impression of the word linotype on the imagination (see OED Supplement Lino³) is very telling: ‘A machine for producing stereotyped lines or bars of words, etc. as a substitute for type-setting.’

25.6 shows her age:* I am reminded of one of the numerous portraits from the long reign of Queen Victoria: not the so-called ‘old head’ with the chaperon demurely veiling the widow’s shoulders, and certainly none of the ‘young heads’ or the ravishing ‘gothic’ portrait of the 1847 crown and the ‘godless’ florin of 1849, but the peculiarly unflattering effigy of the Jubilee coinage of 1887: on which the Queen seems to be standing to military attention, with heavy bags under her eyes and sagging cheeks, like some kind of weary old soldier on the parade ground. The ‘line that marks the boundary of her jowl’ is quite prominent in this portrait. I can hardly imagine the charming young woman just crowned Queen becoming old enough to have such an unpleasant feature appear upon her profile.

25.7 fairy lights and tinsel:* Cheap Christmas decorations, but tinsel also refers to all sorts of low-quality gilt jewellery: precisely the kind of thing Birmingham—the city Edmund Burke baptized ‘the great toyshop of Europe’ (in the House of Commons: March 26, 1777)—is famous for producing. I am surprised the poet could not find a place in the canto for the word bauble. It is often used by Shakespeare as a shorthand for this kind of thing, and might have been particularly fitting.
The Birmingham Counterfeit has the following. The debt is incontestable:

Overwhelmed with deſpair, giving up every thing for loſt, [Mercator] determined to put in execution the reſolution he had long ſince formed. Taking one of the piſtols out of his bureau… ſeating himſelf on a couch, he placed the muzzle to his forehead, and was that moment going to pull the trigger, when, lo! A deep ſleep ſuddenly ſeized him, the piſtol dropped from his hand, and he fell backwards on the couch.
It was in this ſituation he fancied his eyes fixed upon his laſt piece of caſh, the Birmingham ſhilling; and, to his great ſurfpriſe, imagined he beheld it ſwelling to a prodigious bulk, and then burſted with a report louder than that of a cannon.
A figure, difficult to be deſcribed, immediately ſtood before him. On his head was placed a crown of tinſel imitating gold, from every part of which the curious eye might obſerve the moſt venomous poiſon exuding: his perſon was tall, and ſeemingly majeſtic; his robe was of yellow, ſtriped with gold and ſilver, which the wind ſometimes waving to and fro, diſcovering a body covered with an inner filthy garment; in his left hand he carried a looking-glaſs, with which he uſed to amuſe the raſh and credulous, by flattering them with the reſemblance of a face not their own, while he ſtabbed them to the heart with a dagger, which he bore in his right hand, and which he concealed in his boſom. On his face was a maſk repreſenting the features of a moſt beautiful virgin; but this dropping off, a moſt hideous and frightful countenance was diſcovered.

[The Birmingham Counterfeit. 1772, vol I. 36-38]

26.1: the flame:*

Hic focus et taedae pingues, hic plurimus ignis
semper, et adsidua postes fuligine nigri.
Virgil, Eclogue VII

My room is on fire. I can see very little any more besides the desperate shapes of these words scrabbling out from underneath my pen to swarm into the vacant gutters of the manuscript like fleeing rats. I do catch the odd glimpse of the flames from time to time — their naked colours, their ecstatic sacrificial dance — but only as the oily reflections in my pen-nib and the trembling shadows of my hand. I can hear it though, all around me: a choir of hot, bright tongues swelling to a crescendo of unbearable polyphony. ‘Flames are wood turning itself back into music’, somebody once said, it is not important who: they are the souls of trees escaping from imprisonment amongst a building’s eaves (or the pages of a book perhaps), trumpeting the fanfares of liberty they were once content to weave into the whispers passing through their living foliage.
There is no smoke. At least, no smoke except these words; sometimes the letters seem to curl like incense fumes. The smell is not entirely unpleasant. It is mostly burning wood and paper, but there are sometimes overtones of cinnamon or nutmeg, or… perhaps… angelica. Maybe this is the effect of burning ink. The slight bitterness it leaves at the back of the tongue is very similar in taste. ‘Gold changes the way fire does when mixed with spices’ Heraclitus riddles, ‘and is named according to each spice.’ He also says: ‘all things can be exchanged for fire, and fire for all things: as goods for gold and gold for goods.’
He is right. I am on fire too.

26.2 oil-lamp:* I am old enough to remember the domestic oil-lamp. The truly wonderful thing about these objects, lost in this age of electric lighting, was their portability: not like a battery operated torch, that weapon of anonymous accusation the policeman or the air-raid warden wields like an extended finger of approbation; but as an almost magical illumination that would first make the bearer glow himself before spreading out to light up his surroundings. The energy seemed somehow to radiate directly from within. I can still hear the dull pop with which the flame lit up the gas mantle… the clatter of the tube in its casing, the clink of the glass globe on its metal ring when the lamp is carried from one room to another.

26.4 marigold:* The orange blooms produced by plants of the genus Calendula, associated with the Virgin Mary. It is also perhaps important that the word was Restoration slang for the gold sovereign.

26.5 shame:* To pick up the C17^th overtones once more, there is a possible play here on ‘put the sun to sham’ ie shoddily imitate the sun: something which carries precisely the opposite connotations to those of ‘surpassing’ or ‘outshining’ suggested by a surface reading. ‘Sham’ is commonly supposed to be derived from a dialectal form of shame. The OED quotes the following by way of explanation:

Notes to stanzas 21-26