Lines From The Junior Heritage Club's 1939 Advertisement For a Special Edition of Tennyson's Idylls of the King I Wish Were About Me

Previously in this series: Lines from John Banville’s Wikipedia Page I Wish Were About Me.

The “Junior Heritage Club,” an old division of George Macy’s Heritage Press (1937-1982), used to issue beautiful little “Monthly Magazine” advertisements for special editions of various classics, with that wonderfully breathless and high-handed tone peculiar to early twentieth-century literary marketing. The 1939 advertisement for a hand-illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is perhaps the most winsome advertisement I have ever read, and it makes me ache with unhappiness that I cannot live my own life and also Lord Alfred Tennyson’s, and also illustrator Robert Ball’s, and also the Junior Heritage Club copywriter who put the pamphlet together. It is wonderfully lucky to get to be alive at all, but far from making me graceful and grateful, vitality breeds greed in me. Yesterday I wept for a good twenty minutes at the thought that I will never get to be an elephant or Alfred Lord Tennyson, which is the sort of thing a hideously precocious child might do in a particularly trying novel.

“Robert Ball is a young American, who spends his winters in New York and his summers in Provincetown. He has a pencil of bewildering brilliance. He is a draftsman of unusual skill, yet he is a skillful draftsman with an unusual imagination.”

“Who spends his winters in New York and his summers in Provincetown” is one of the better gay euphemisms I’ve yet come across. I can’t quite work out the balance of the final sentence here. It’s not quite a syllogism, because you need two premises to make a syllogism, or something like that, but it’s close. A preposition, maybe. At any rate, it’s an argument of some kind, and I’m not quite sure what the “yet” is doing there, but I like the idea of someone having an argument with themselves about the precise nature of the relationship between the unusualness of my skill and the completeness of my skill.

“He illustrated The Compleat Angler for The Heritage Press, with pencil drawings of great beauty, pencil drawings which give to the owner of the Ball Compleat Angler a knowledge of the streams Izaak Walton fished in, the fish he fished for, and the people of Izaak Walton’s day with whom he must have fished. That is a remarkable edition of The Compleat Angler, the one which Robert Ball illustrated for The Heritage Press, and we count that man or woman unfortunate who does not own a copy.”

Closer to Izaak Walton than Izaak Walton himself, and nothing but pity for the poor chumps who have yet to own my sketches of historical fish.

“[Baskerville] made a fortune out of enameling boxes: which you may have done yourself at some time, if someone trusted you with the lacquer. Then he became a writing-master, and from being a writing-master he became a printer and publisher. Out of his experience in japanning boxes and plates and such things, he tried making a paper with a smooth surface; having thus succeeded in japanning paper, he designed a type in which thin strokes were cleverly contrasted with thick strokes; the thin strokes in his types were pleasantly printed upon paper with a smooth finish.”

What an if! Yes, you, gentle reader, if you have been exceedingly lucky, might have been sufficiently entrusted with lacquer so as to recreate the same sort of careful task I long-ago perfected, and made a fortune in so doing. Your fumbling, childish attempts are adorable inasmuch as their clumsiness highlight the perfection of my method. After which, of course, I decided to cleverly contrast thin strokes with thick strokes, and pleasantly printed a beautiful new font on excellent paper, satisfying everyone for miles around.

“In February of the next year Charles and Alfred went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Alfred Tennyson soon became the center of a brilliant group of friends…Among his leading friends at Cambridge were men named Trench, Monckton, Milnes, Spedding, Thompson, FitzGerald, and, above all, A.H. Hallam.”

When describing the famous brilliance of my college friends, leave not out the terrific Trench, forget not Monckton, omit not Spedding, but above all, when discussing my famous, brilliant circle of friends, eternally youthful and each day blossoming anew with promise, above all you must be sure to mention A.H. Hallam, and accept no substitutes.

“In the summer of 1830 Tennyson and Hallam volunteered in the army of the Spanish insurgent, Torrijos, and marched about in the Pyrenees, but were never under fire.”

Not once!! As safe as we were brave, as brave as we were safe, we marched about in the Pyrenees doing wonderful, voluntary deeds to further the struggle against tyranny, which we did with the same perfect security as a chick in her mother’s nest.

“Tennyson was now in excellent health and at the height of his genius; he was writing abundantly and delighting in the friendship of Hallam, who was engaged to the poet’s sister, Emily.”

Better and better!!

“Until after the burial of Hallam in 1834 he wrote nothing; but, as his mind grew calmer, he began the Idylls of the King and In Memoriam, and once more spent the quiet years in his Lincolnshire village in a devotion to the art of poetry.”

If my life must have grief in it, let that grief serve as a glowing, silent monument to my capacity for great love and deep gibbets of sympathy, and let me be as famous for quietly devoting myself to poetry in Lincolnshire as I was once famous for my brilliant association with Spedding et al, who once made me, the future Poet Laureate of all England, laugh so hard at his impression of the sun going behind a cloud that I had to lie down on the ground.

“It was now nearly ten years since Tennyson, greatly discouraged, had broken silence with the public; but in 1842 he consented, after much debate, to publish, in two volumes, his Poems, new and old…The book made an instant sensation, and it is from 1842 that the universal fame of Tennyson must be dated.”

It simply must be from this year and no other that my universal fame, defined quite differently from my earlier, youthful, particular fames (of which there were at least several) must be dated! It is not a matter of opinion, but of clear fact that I at last consented to publish my great work, after tremendous urging from my friends and even my rivals, my haters and naysayers, who sent me locks of their hair enclosed in letters written with a passionate, trembling hand, saying, “My God, you must break your silence – you must step into the river of your own eternal fame at last – even I who hate you would not see you at anything less than your fullest flower —”

“Before the year was out he had succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.”

As simply and surely as Wednesday succeeds Tuesday.

“There was now a sharp reaction against his popularity, and the reception of this admirable book was in part very severe; Tennyson, always unduly sensitive, was much wounded. He withdrew among his ilexes at Farringford, and for some years little was heard of him.”

I do not know what an ilex is, and I do not wish to, but I do wish very much to withdraw among my ilexes (for I have many ilexes, not just one) at Farringford once I become too popular. Leave me to my ilexes, you chattering masses; all I need is my ilexes, both at Farringford and abroad, and I shall be content.

“In 1859 he reappeared with the first series of the Idylls of the King, which achieved a popular success far exceeding anything experienced by Tennyson before, or by any other poet of his time.”

Just kidding!! I’m going to become even more popular than the time I got too popular to be universally beloved!! Didn’t see that coming, did you?

“The years slipped by with scarcely any incidents except the poet’s occasional summer journeys on the Continent. He became an object of extreme curiosity.”

Between my periodic bouts of extreme popularity I will have seasons of deep, almost breathless, rest, such incidentless peace that I will have in some ways have stepped into eternity while still living; naturally this will make people even more curious about me, the incredibly popular Poet Laureate they already know so much about, but wish they could know even more about, but please, leave me to my peace and my ilexes.

“In 1884 he was made Lord Tennyson. His health had recovered, he entered with a marvelous elasticity of mind and body into old age. His bodily powers failed at last, in his eighty-fourth year, and he passed away, at Aldworth, on the night of the 6th of October 1892.”

Yes! Yes! I will briefly become Jack LaLanne and Thomas Merton when I turn 80 and enjoy several years of spiritual agility the likes of which is rarely seen on this sorrowful earth, and then I will quietly fall into my final slumber when the autumn ilex harvest is at last gathered in.

“Tennyson was a man of unusually tall stature and powerful physique, although liable to suffer from nervous forms of indisposition. He was described when at college as ‘six feet high, broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearian, with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark, wavy hair, his hand the admiration of sculptors.’ Carlyle described Tennyson as a ‘fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man, most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted.’ His voice was ‘musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between.’”

I don’t think this is too much to ask! Tall like a lumberjack, sensitive like a water-lily, six feet tall, brushes his hair with 100 strokes every night like Marcia Brady, face like Shakespeare, sculptors always stopping me in the street to gasp “Please – your hands — this is what I became an artist for —” and clutch at my sleeves, Carlyle’s favorite bulldog, restful as a nap, the world’s brother, a record laugher, and in my spare time a proficient of grief.

“He was extremely short-sighted, yet so keenly observant that he once saw the moonlight reflected in a nightingale’s eye, as she sat singing in the hedgerow.”

And he ate starlight and he outran the fastest train in the country and he could see feelings inside his friends’ bodies and he was ten feet tall and made of gold and once he jumped so high that Queen Victoria cried and clapped and announced no one would die in the whole country for the next year, and no one did!!

Now back to illustrator Robert Ball:

“It came to have a strange reality, as real (or perhaps more real in a different way) as the daily life that went on about him — the Siege of Troy and the Argonauts, Alexander and Julius Caesar, Guy of Warwick, Arthur of Britain, Richard the Lionheart, the Black Prince — these and many others became his heroes. He never tired of their exploits then, and he never has!”

And he never has! And he never has! And he’s never grown lonely since, not once, nor tired, and he isn’t tired now, and he has more friends than ever, and they’re all coming over for a sleepover, only none of us are tired, not a bit, and we’ll stay up all night if we want to! And we do want to!

“He had a horse which he loved, and which he used to ride a great deal. Also he had a back-yard menagerie of many animals and many birds, which his parents allowed him to keep. And there was a large room, too, in which fencing and boxing and sometimes work on chemical experiments, went on.”

There’s such poignancy in an advertisement pausing to advertise the illustrator’s childhood to one! “And nothing was forbidden to him, and he grew up beautifully, and he had a horse and moreover he got to ride his horse whenever he wanted, and his parents always let him take care of as many birds and rabbits and whatever other animals he wanted, and he even had a chemistry set, and it was as wonderful as you thought it would be.”

“The great business of books was for a long time buried, though never forgotten. Prevented by all sorts of things, many of them interesting, and some of them useful…But one day the time came, and since then books have been the great interest. These have nearly all been done in a house in Provincetown, which is almost a house-boat, built out over the water of the bay.”

Oh, please let the time come, and let the time be in a house that is almost a boat, built out over the water of the bay. Let the time come, for four reasonable and leather-bound payments, amen.