Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) was a member of one of those interesting families which produces, in succeeding generations, people who are notable for very different reasons. He was the father of the renowned British cartoonist Nicolas Bentley, and the son of John Edmund Bentley, who played for England, and against Scotland, in the first ever international rugby match, held in 1871. (As a Scottish person, I feel compelled to mention that we were victorious on this occasion, though I should add that England got their revenge in a return game the following year.)
The man who occupied the middle position in this triptych of Bentleys was a writer, perhaps most famous in his lifetime for his detective novel, Trent’s Last Case. Nowadays, if he is remembered at all, it’s more likely to be for his invention of the curious verse form to which he gave his middle name. I first became aware of this at the age of seventeen, when I found a complete edition of Bentley’s clerihews in a bookshop, and have been fascinated by it ever since.
Structurally, a clerihew has four lines arranged in two couplets with an AABB rhyme scheme, and it is both biographical and whimsical, often with a measure of satire. In these respects, it’s indistinguishable from the Balliol rhyme, invented in 1880, of which this is a typical example:
My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My face is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.
Clerihews, however, are not the same as Balliol rhymes because of a feature added, or rather a constraint removed, by Bentley: Balliol rhymes always scan, but clerihews don’t have to. This is evident in the earliest known clerihew – the ur-clerihew, if you will – written while he was still at school but not published until 1905:
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
(For completeness, and to avoid the risk of enraging clerihew scholars by not mentioning it, I’ll add that Bentley originally wrote ‘was not fond of gravy’ in the second line, but changed this before publication.)
The Davy rhyme is one of the most famous clerihews because it was written before all the others, but I’d be surprised if anyone feels it’s the best. Bentley wrote many more, and seems to have become increasingly at ease with the form, as can be seen in:
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder
and:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I am designing St Paul's."
and (my favourite):
I regard Zinghis Khan
As rather an over-rated man.
What, after all, could be easier
Than conquering from the Pacific to Silesia?
Like other innovative artists, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bentley was quite prepared to break the rules he had created. I don’t think the following is his finest effort, but it’s significant both because it is, as far as I know, his only mono-rhymed clerihew (AAAA rhyme scheme) and because, very unusually, it has a more or less regular metric pattern:
Caius Julius Caesar
Patented a lemon-squeezer,
Also an ice-cream freezer
And a chariot axle-greaser.
In this very early clerihew, he even removed the biographical element, though biography itself is the subject:
The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.
Even if you adhere strictly to the usual definition, clerihews are fairly simple, which causes a problem familiar to anyone who has attempted to write one. Artists in various fields have demonstrated that imposing severe restrictions on themselves can lead to great creativity. This can be seen in the work of the Austrian composer Anton Webern and the Chinese poet Li Bai. Shakespeare made iambic pentameter look easy, but try writing a sustained passage in it and you’ll find yourself facing a mighty challenge.
The same thing can be found in humorous verse. Limericks are tricky, and double dactyls (a later and far more demanding form than the clerihew) are nightmarish, yet their difficulty has in many cases been gloriously overcome. In contrast, while it’s easy to write something which all competent observers would accept as a true clerihew, writing a good one is a different matter entirely.
Even Bentley didn’t hit the mark every time, and none other than W.H. Auden, widely esteemed as one of the finest British poets of the twentieth century, famously struggled. Auden, a prolific clerihewer, wrote enough for a collection called Academic Graffiti (published in 1971 by Faber & Faber) which, I make so bold as to suggest, would have been hurled angrily into the nearest waste paper basket if it had been submitted by anyone less famous.
Among many other things, Auden was the author of the Hymn to Saint Cecilia, written specifically for Benjamin Britten to put to music, which Britten did magnificently. (His setting, dating from 1942, must be one of the very few pieces composed while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean during wartime, though the same can also be said of his Ceremony of Carols.) It’s almost unbelievable that the Hymn, which includes this beautiful passage:
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire
was written by someone who apparently regarded what you’re about to read as being suitable for publication:
My first name, Wystan,
Rhymes with Tristan,
But – O dear! – I do hope
I’m not quite such a dope
or that he felt the same way about this, which is less awful but would still be unlikely to get any further than the quarter-final stage of an amateur clerihew-writing competition:
Edward Lear
Was haunted by the fear
While travelling in Albania
Of contracting kleptomania.
(An aside: the British satirical magazine Private Eye responded to Academic Graffiti as follows:
W.H. Auden
Suffers from acute boredom
But for his readers he's got some merry news
He's written a collection of rather bad clerihews.
The rhyming of the second couplet seems acceptable to me – I’m not so sure about the first – but Bentley himself once rhymed ‘clerihew’ with ‘weary you’. Since he presumably knew how to pronounce his own name, Bentley must be considered the authority, but every time I read the word I hear it internally as ‘clerry-hew’, not ‘cleary-ewe’.)
Reading about Bentley and enjoying his work made me want to follow his lead. I decided I would write forty-eight verses of the type he had invented, all on a musical theme, and have them published – believing (ah, innocence!) that finding someone prepared to make this happen would be a simple matter – under the title The Well-Tempered Clerihew. If you’re familiar with the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, and in particular with his most famous collection of pieces for keyboard instruments, I’m sure you’ll agree that this was a Jolly Good Idea and Awfully Clever.
I wasn’t aware then that publishers generally shy away from anything written by someone they haven’t heard of, and didn’t find out until a long time afterwards because I abandoned the project before it had become worthwhile to start looking for one. I wrote more than the necessary forty-eight clerihews, but quickly rejected most of them. Only about a dozen survived the process, and that was hardly enough for even the slimmest of volumes. One of the few I can still remember, and am not entirely ashamed of, went like this:
Popular opinion fancies
That affluent circumstances
Are what Joseph Haydn
Died in.
As a sort of tribute to Bentley, I also wrote a mono-rhymed clerihew:
While staying in Rio
Darius Milhaud
Composed a string trio
Allegro con brio
and a non-biographical one, referring to but not specifically mentioning Richard Wagner, which I like to think adequately sums up a fifteen-hour opera cycle in ten words:
The Ring
Is difficult to sing.
It teems
With themes.
Sub-Bentley, no doubt, but – O dear! – I do hope not quite sub-Auden.
I haven’t concocted a clerihew since before I turned twenty, but maybe I’ll try again one day. You could, too. They’re frustrating, but also good fun, and excellent practice for any writer. Or we could take the easy route and just read Bentley’s originals, marvelling at both his wonderful idea and the little jewels it made possible.
Top image of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, by unknown photographer, published in The Bookman (New York, May 1913).
Public domain
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G K Chesterton
Was among the best of them:
Once he regarded himself clever as a fox
Only to find himself quite orthodox.
That’s not perfect but at least I gave it a go.
Terrific! GK Chesterton dedicated his Greta The Man Who Was Thursday to Clerihew.