Life on the Right Bank

Two WORLDS FOR MEMORY (348 pp.)--Alfred Noyes--Lippincotf ($5).

Alfred Noyes is to English poetry much what the Royal Academy is to English painting. In his 72 years, Noyes has watched the breaking of storm upon storm of "experimental" poetry, but each tempest has only strengthened his conviction that the poet's best anchorage is somewhere between Swinburne and Kipling. Thus, in an age when poetry has become increasingly hard to understand, Noyes's lyrics have remained, for better or worse, untouched by intellectual complexity.

Noyes's autobiography shows that his life has traveled on the same orthodox feet as his poetry. Of his parents, he says firmly: "I have nothing sadistic to report." Of his childhood: "Nor can I utter a single agonized cry of self-pity." As an Oxford undergraduate he joined "a little group . . . who were keenly interested in literature," but "rowing became the most important thing in life." He records only two rebellious outbursts: a spell of agnos--ticism at the age of 15, and playing hooky from Oxford exams in order to write his first volume of poems.

Highway to Hollywood. One advantage of Noyes's traditionalism was that his work quickly became popular. His first collection, The Loom of Years (1902), was welcomed alike by George Meredith and Punch. When he wrote The Phantom Fleet, a poetic plea for a bigger & better British navy, even the Admiralty was roused. "The Navy League made use of it on Trafalgar Day ... and presented me with a walkingstick made of the oak and bronze of Nelson's Victory."

Noyes's next success, The Highwayman, carried him even further--into "scores of anthologies and several hundred schoolbooks in England and America." It has since become the basis of two cantatas (one by Deems Taylor) and, like another popular Noyes work, Dick Turpin's Ride, the theme of a movie. On these successes Scotsman Ian Crawford based his fine parody, Hollywood Highwayman, with its memorable third stanza:

"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart. Gee! That's the way I feel,

But I shall be back with the crown jewels

before the end of the reel. And if they fade me early or dissolve me

through the day, Then look for me by limelight

(5,000 watts of limelight); I'll come to thee by limelight, though

Karloff bars the way."

Visiting Englishman. International peace, based on Anglo-American cooperation, was a favorite Noyes theme even before World War I. In 1911 he went to the U.S. on his first lecture tour, and in 1914 became Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton. Some of Noyes's best anecdotes belong to his periods in the U.S:

P: British Ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice was prone to reveries, during which he was apt to forget that he was attending an official function and think he was watching a play. When, at Princeton, a bishop intoned a superb benediction, Spring-Rice was so impressed by the "performance" that he brought his hands together with a resounding clap," and was only saved from further applause by Astronomer George Ellery Hale, who nimbly pinned the ambassadorial elbows together from behind.

P: Boston's Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich was "the only person in existence who had seen Harriet Beecher Stowe drunk" It happened when youthful, innocent Hostess Aldrich decided to impart a higher tone to her claret cup by adding the contents of a curiously shaped bottle which she understood came from a Carthusian monastery." The day was warm, and after downing two tumblers of the brew, Visitor Stowe had the illusion that she had become a sailor. Her "berth" (the sofa), she complained, was "going up and down" so tempestuously that she had difficulty in climbing into it. Her last words, growled out as she collapsed: "I won't be any properer than I've a mind to be. Let me sleep."

"Curious Tolerance." Britain between the wars was a bad climate for a poet like Noyes. Increasingly hailed by the older generation, he was an archenemy of the younger. In Noyes's eyes, for example the so-called "stream of subconscious ideas meant only "the entire contents of the garbage can and the sewer." He prided himself that his objections to James Joyce's Ulysses ("filth") prevented its being praised on the BBC, and he ordered Novelist Hugh Walpole out of his house for recommending it to one of Noyes's daughters. To a more modern generation of poets, he appeared the epitome of everything to be avoided in British traditionalism.

Posterity is likely to take a kinder view. If he never wrote an "experimental" poem in his life, his Highwayman is still one of the most rousing rhymes in the schoolbooks, and is long apt to be so. If his preferred friends on two continents were unfailingly genteel--and apt, like himself, to deplore "that curious modern tolerance for things which ought not to be tolerated"--he has written, in Two Worlds jor Memory, a candid and gossipy account life & letters on the old Right Bank.

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