53.8 villanelle:* A play on she-villain perhaps. Other than that, I fail to see what the persona might have against the Villanelle. It is really not a comparable form. I suspect he is supposed to get some irreverent gratification from the Brummagem rhyme with ‘blinkinell’.
54.4 flops:* Sloggy’s body is usually erect. This moment of flopping is the moment we leave him and follow first his girlfriend, her car, and then the fox towards Britannia’s bedroom. It is almost as if he is no longer Sloggy when, like the ‘drunken sailor’, he slumps—in the way a phallus is no longer a phallus when not engorged—and his character literally ‘unwinds’: unravels and runs out of wind (like a sail going limp.) Later his physical body will become dissipated in a different way by the coin’s gaze through the mock crystal-cut ashtray (see 229.3).
55.8 pizza:* Italian for ‘pie’. The word is used in ironic pretension; the box is probably just one of those flimsy folded card affairs in which bakers put cakes for transportation. The moral environment of gluttony and careless littering (‘wrapped up’ in Italianate language by way of a sarcastic mock-dignification) is therefore driven home: this is a society in which people routinely eat sugary cakes or pies in the street and toss away the packaging. One cannot avoid being reminded of nursery rhymes: ‘A Song of Sixpence’ for example, ‘Simple Simon’, and (perhaps especially) ‘The Queen of Hearts’.
The second occurrence of this word—in stanza 148, in a prurient pun: ‘12 inch pizza boy’—forces us to acknowledge the proximity of this foreign word to the English ‘pizzle’ (originally the member of a bull used as a flogging instrument, but now the penis of any large mammal). Perhaps there is a deliberate employment of these phallic undertones to raise the ‘pizza box’ to the level of a totem: both a site of disruption and a shamanistic gateway between two worlds—that of Sloggy and that of the fox. It is also possible, therefore, that the word is to be pronounced not /'pi:tsa/ but /'pizə/ or even /'pi:zə/ in this Birminghamized dialect (the latter being homonymous with the town containing Italy’s most infamously crooked phallic symbol).
56.2 copper:* (See 26.8 the right way round?* for a discussion of copper tokens as opposed to gold and silver money.) The association of the fox with copper is a natural poetic commonplace when one considers its colour. The question we should ask, however, as with any well-thumbed copper coin, is not what is its natural worth, but what precisely does it stand for? A certain cunning in defiance of the noble hunter, no doubt; a disregard for estate and property; an ability to breach the frontiers of the proverbial henhouse; the mentality of the disobedient scavenger: these things are salient but tend to miss the importance of the creature’s name beyond its beastly nature. Four men shared the name with the creature through the period of history that formed this city into the icon of the new dissenting revolutionary movement: Charles Fox, the leader of the Whigs in Parliament in the C18th, who supported the French Revolution; George Fox, the founder of The (Quaker) Society of Friends, whose ideas and followers laid the crucial foundation stones for the capitalist industrial revolution in the English midlands; John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments (better known as The Book of Martyrs) was perhaps the most important text in the birth of Puritanism and later the fomenting of the Civil War; and Colonel ‘Tinker’ Fox, a Birmingham metalworker who became the leader of an extremely cunning, unruly and effective band of Parliamentarian guerrillas who used Edgbaston Hall in the town as their headquarters during the period of the 1640s (between its infamous sacking and the creation of the New Model Army.)
This last figure is without doubt the most likely to be referenced. ‘Tinker’ Fox’s virtual single-handed disruption of Royalist control of the Midlands (always the main battleground of the war) provided not just the impetus but also the logistic model for the Parliamentarian regrouping and Cromwell’s ultimately successful new army. Fox’s was a troop of full-time professional soldiers who were drawn almost exclusively from amongst the metalworkers and new tradesmen of the area and they shared a zealous and radical non-conformist faith extreme enough to label the enemy ‘Amalekites’. He was eventually sidelined towards the end of the war because of his persistent refusals to compromise in terms of theological politics and the (quite unsurprising) prevalence of support for the Levellers amongst his followers.
It cannot be emphasized strongly enough how important was the Civil War in cementing the symbolic relationship between Birmingham and the libertarian anti-royalism emphasized in this poem. Before the war the town was just a sapling of the dominance of commerce and industry over the ancient values of order and nobility that would characterize the next three centuries. It was little known beyond its immediate environs. The arming of the Parliamentary forces by Robert Porter, the ubiquity of the pamphlet Birmingham’s Flames with its satirical woodcut of Prince Rupert firing the town (plus another, equally biased, on the same subject by Porter himself), and the ‘heroic’ tales of Tinker Fox’s exploits which subsequently circulated in the dissenting underground all changed that. Birmingham became genuinely famous. Clarendon was moved to single the town out as ‘notorious’ for ‘hearty, wiful, affected disloyalty to the King’. Never again would anyone have to wonder which town in England stood purely for radicalism, industry, unfettered commerce, and defiance of the church and crown. Birmingham had foxed the monarchy.
56.2-3 dorsal / Fur:* There is a good deal of evidence that the poem was originally intended to be even more prosaic than it is. The ‘unstuttered’ enjambments that characterize this stanza—in which lines ending with a falling multisyllable are followed by trochees, so as to avoid interrupting the regular alternations of stress—are very common in the erased stanzas (see 68-78 for example). The result is to prejudice the continuity of prose rhythm over the purity of the poetic line. Obviously, the ‘purity of the poetic line’ is hardly a great concern in this intentionally sub-Byronic idiom, but it is interesting that the poet should choose this moment in particular to legitimize these otherwise rigorously eradicated, prosaic enjambments. One might expect the fox’s linguistic environment to be more, not less, poetic; and in lexical and metaphoric terms, at least, I think it is.
The prosaic rhythm may just derive from a desire not to abandon the rhyme on Balsall (Heath) which cannot be achieved in any other way. There is a sense, however, in which this rhythmic suppleness mirrors, in the prosody, the transformative effect the fox has upon the viewer and the whole environment. There seems to be an inability on the part of the verse-form to contain the fox. Just as, in the following stanzas, the fox’s image appears to distort its televisual representation (as if it emits some form of jamming signal), here its casual/causal movement effects a metamorphosis on the shoddy burlesque: it trots between the stationary rhymes like treetrunks, turning Ottava Rima into what, these days, we might want to call prose-poetry.
57.6-8 bandages embalmed with sap… dog-eared book:* The poet is playing on the idea of ‘foxing’ (the build up of mineral and fungal deposits, similar to certain varieties of lichen, creating a mottled orange/brown effect) in old manuscripts. ‘Dog-eared’ obviously adds, metonymically, to the effect. The likening of this deterioration of old books to the flaky bandages on Egyptian mummies is very worrying...
embalmed with sap: In a cloyingly solecistic contribution to the latest Philological Quarterly (XXXII, III, July 1953: 344-6), Robert A. Day from Dartmouth College supports Grierson’s tacky suggestion that ‘glew’ in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell ("Now therefore, while the youthful hew / Sits on thy skin like morning glew,") refers to "the glistening gum found on the bark of certain trees" on the startling grounds that Marvell could have read Gavin Douglas’s Middle Scots mistranslation—‘gum or glew’—of viscum (‘mistletoe’) in the description of the Golden Bough from the Æneid. Not only does Day countenance Grierson’s reading (can we really accept that Marvell, despite his love of the unsettling image, is suggesting this young woman appears to be covered in something resembling Lyle’s Golden Syrup?) but he also excuses Douglas’s translation for the reason that viscum can also refer to myrrh or birdlime.
This is patently absurd. Marvell means ‘glow’, nothing more unpleasant. He is likening the girl’s blushing skin to the approaching sun—the first pink light of morning—and therefore intensifying the paradox of his seductive appeal that she join him in escaping it. The standard emendation to ‘dew’ is wrong, but perfectly understandable in the context; and much less ridiculous than ‘glue’.
Day has stumbled blindly upon something vital in this Virgilian thicket, however. The ‘glew’ in question (though neither ‘gum’ nor ‘mistletoe’) nevertheless might bear arboreal overtones: ‘thy willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires.’ A surface gloss might be something like: So, while you are still in the pink, like the first light of dawn, and while the burning blush in your skin betrays your concealed arousal [‘willing soul’ as opposed to resisting body]… A deeper reading, however—one that approached a little closer to the Marvellian idiom—would suggest the contradictory images of biological mortality and spiritual immortality which co-exist as a transcendental paradox in the phallic icon of the Golden Bough. To return to the arboreal overtones, perhaps ‘instant fires’ might therefore be glossed as fox-fires.
Fox-fire, to elucidate, is an unearthly phosphorescence emitted by naturally decaying wood. A perfect metaphor for Marvell and also, I would have the temerity to suggest, a much more likely explanation of the Golden Bough phenomenon than Frazer’s: that the mistletoe itself is what makes the bough ‘golden’ (led by a desire to literalize the connection he sees between the Druids and the ancestors of the Romans). Virgil simply uses viscum as a metaphor, perhaps (out of a desire to draw the same universalising analogies as Frazer) in the knowledge of Druidic ritual use of the winter-fruiting epiphyte. It certainly seems much more natural to me that the glowing branch should be literally (and very practically) incandescent (Virgil is at great pains to emphasize the gloominess and deathliness of the grove) and that the ease with which Æneas can detach it from the trunk can be explained by its rottenness. The important connection Frazer draws with lightning need not be lost. The tree could easily be one that had been struck by lightning (hence the dead bough) and understood therefore somehow literally to contain the power of the thunder god (Jove).
All of which brings me back to this strange, foxing moment in the copse of silver birches. The fungal deterioration of a book, the bandages around a mummy (usually encased in figurative golden sarcophagi), the strange glow emitting from dead wood: all these things seem to be disturbing portents of the ‘first glimpse of our heroine’. We are about to watch as, like the morning (or ‘mourning’) glew that sits on the skin of Marvell’s Coy Mistress, the ‘sun leaks bright lines on… the landscape of [Britannia’s] skin like grapefruit rind.’ Unlike Marvell, though, there is nothing in the least bit ‘coy’ about this Sibylline hag.
The fact that fox-fire also (once again) connotes George Fox’s inner light of Quakerism should not go unnoted.
book: The etymological roots of this word are traditionally traced to bók, Old Norse for ‘beech’, with the explanation that runic writings were thought to have been originally cut into the bark of these trees. Our poet appears to have found some deeper common origin however. The most primeval forms of writing in forested countries—analogues of which can still be found in English woods—might easily have been short messages of love, warning, belonging and self-assertion carved into the trunks of trees. So, a hypothesis: ‘beech’, ‘birch’, ‘bark’ and ‘book’ are all cognate. I do not have the resources to check this properly at the moment, but I suspect I am right.
Furthermore, if I were to choose from amongst the indigenous species a type of bark which might be easily taken off and used in a similar way to modern paper, I would choose not the beech, but the silver birch.
58.2 drawn:* A wincing play on ‘sketched’ and ‘dragged’ or ‘gutted’ (as a corporal/capital punishment).
58.5* Notice that the camera ‘shot’ has become like paint on canvas. The fox has also become ‘half-formed’ (quasimodo). The suggestion is, I think, that the fox’s influence on the scenery has extended to the lens through which it is supposedly seen. Its nature cannot be contained by the technology and is disrupting the reception. In literal terms, I see this as a moment in which the ‘screen’ on which the fox is being watched suffers noise and problems with its horizontal hold creating a distorted and disturbing appearance similar to one of the grotesque and apparently vandalized parodies of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez with which the enfant terrible of the British artworld, Francis Bacon, has been trying (more than a little phantasmagorically) to terrorize the critical establishment this year. The effect is only temporary though, and, of course, it is the fox that fixes it.
The eczema spread across his perinæum
Like dry-rot in a crypt or a museum.
59.8 vixen:* The word vixen sounds plural to me. The extra syllable,—en, is a pluralising suffix in words like children, oxen and brethren. This seems to go along with a multiple sense of femininity, compared to singular masculinity. The genitals must have something to do with it. A phallus is a one; it stands up to be counted. The pussy is… more complex: not a pussy at all… a vixen’s den.[Poet’s note]
This is by far the longest of the poet’s own marginal interjections. The handwriting is strangely childlike and inconsistent. I hold little store with graphology however and refuse to draw any conclusions from this. I shall also resist speculating as to whether these brief annotations are not, in fact, the work of the original poet, but of some interfering editor. The free license taken in erasing and altering the text, the flippancy and brevity of the comments, the similarities in turn of phrase to those which appear in print all suggest a writer editing his own work. It is this entry in particular which serves to justify the philological-hermeneutics of my approach. The poet is revealed to be an explorer amongst the linguistic undergrowth, intent on unearthing the hidden, tangled roots of words.
That said, however, there is a seriously tendentious and narrow account of the –en suffix given here. This ending carries its own complexities and ambiguities as a morpheme. It can form diminutives like kitten and maiden, feminines like vixen, plurals like oxen, adjectives from nouns as in golden, verbs from adjectives as in darken and fasten, and past participles (and therefore adjectives) from strong verbs as in sunken and broken. It is a multiplicitous and metamorphic suffix which is given its only surviving ‘feminine’ aspect by the word vixen. The poet is perfectly aware of this, I think. He perhaps sees these marginalia as part and parcel of the ironic effect, and therefore by no means as exegesis. The idea is probably to bring us back to the dangerous ambiguities and multiplicities of language which surround the anti-heroine to whom we are imminently to be introduced.
60.1 waxwing lyrical:* ‘Waxing lyrical’. Anyone who has spent time in archives of manuscripts, examining the work of C16th and C17th scribes (or even reading the increasingly shoddy work of modern students) will recognize the syllabic repetition of the first letter of a word as one of the most common orthographic errors. The phrase is still rather dubious however. I assume it to be used by analogy to the growing moon and in reference to a blooming or strengthening of intense poetic diction. There is also a simultaneous strand of the usual negative, tawdry symbolism. Employing a painterly metaphor, one can refer to purple prose as ‘laying it on thick’ or ‘with a trowel’, an action which seems very similar to another denotation for waxing: the daubing of depilatory wax on the hirsute limbs of a female impersonator.
The bird, Bombycilla garrulous is famous for being a pretentious chatterer and also a herald of cold weather and bad tidings. In French it is jaseur, which also means ‘a pompous, verbose critic’, after its incessant and over-elaborate chirruping. In Dutch it is pestvoegel ‘the plague-bird’ being the leader of the migrators from Siberia which fly before the blizzards like the flagships of an invading Slavic winter. For once, however, despite the obvious preoccupation with Aristophanes, I think it might be a little far-fetched to argue that the poet intends this error. Allusions to Icarus are certainly beyond the realms of possibility.
62.7 smitten:* The reliteralisation of this metaphor makes me flinch. The verb to smite could have come straight out of the King James Old Testament, but the tendency in contemporary English is to restrict the word’s use to the past-participle metaphor meaning ‘love-struck’. The persona insists, however, on the riding crop as the most salient of the feudal trappings and therefore brings us back from smitten to smite. This is the anti-Episcopalian hatred of the TV-voice infecting the metaphoric undertow of the stanza. As a rather Miltonic gesture, it is championing the proto-communist egalitarianism of industrial capitalism and likening the traditional deference to (or smittenness with) aristocracy and sovereignty amongst the unpoliticized peasantry to idolatry. Within this ideology, the only figure allowed to smite is God, between whom and the puritan individualist no man shall come. The riding crop is therefore depicted as a cheap, idolatrous imitation of the holy thunderbolt.
Crop also carries obvious agricultural overtones which allow it to reap an allegorical harvest from the traditional political divide between town and country. Remember, for example, the importance of the Corn Laws in the creation of the modern Conservative Party. Further evidence of this castigation of the putatively feudal aristocracy and its proponents, is the word trapping, which, (before it was generalized to mean any surface adornment denoting status) was originally a decorative caparison covering a horse’s saddle, and therefore a natural partner to the crop. It also has its own obvious hunting connotations.
63.2 press play:* One can only surmise the hyphen to have been accidentally left out of this particular American scion. There is a typical pattern involving two apparently contradictory complex verbs here: the compound press-play and the phrasal pull back. The latter, via an analogy with retreat, probably denotes the action of reducing the magnification of the scene by mechanically reducing the distance between the two lenses in the camera whilst the film is still running. This is also, I believe, ‘to pan out’, the opposite of the action that follows: to zoom in. Press-play, is perhaps an American sporting or military metaphor, literally meaning to push forward quickly into opposition territory (the opposite of a retreat) and thereby put them under pressure. In Britain we might say press forward or press on. In cinematic/televisual terms this could refer to winding the ‘tape’ forwards at a faster than normal speed to skip over unessential material or else create a comic effect. Obviously, however, if one wanted to create this effect in filming (rather than in projection or editing) one would have to do precisely the opposite; namely, slow the revolution of the film spool in the camera. The apparently oxymoronic action of press-playing and pulling back, is therefore revealed to be a counter effect: a vulgarly rapid change of scene in which the camera angle and focus are suddenly changed without filming being stopped. The poet is clearly tempting us to call out ‘cut!’
63.4 camera: era 9
63.4 The River Rea:* The Rea is one of the three main rivers in Birmingham; the others being The Tame and The Cole (all three of which flow North and East to join The Trent). The city’s name most probably derives (though more on this below) from the Toll bridge across the Rea at Deritend which was controlled by the De Bermingham family, who diverted the river to create a moat around their estate. The standard story of Birmingham’s strange rise as a new commercial and industrial city can be summarized as follows. Conrad Gill in his recent first volume Manor and Borough to 1865 in the large two-volume History of Birmingham published last year by the OUP suggests the city’s birth was: