A brief explanation of the origin of my previous post. Or perhaps I should say, a favourite example of the kind of playful outlook which inspired it.
The Irish humorous writer Brian O'Nolan (celebrated in a couple of recent posts on my brother-blog, Barstool Blues) once described an elaborate invention which would sweep the snow from your roof as soon as it fell, use a huge vacuum pump to suck it down through your house via a system of ducts, and then store it in perfect condition in specially designed freezer chests in your basement.
The purpose of this device was to enable you, if some floppy young aesthete attending a dinner party of yours should happen to quote François Villon's famous line "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?", to confound his contrived melancholy by roaring, "I've got them in the cellar! Would you like to have a look?"
I have scarcely done justice to O'Nolan's original exposition of this idea (complete with diagrams). Quite simply, one of the funniest writers I have ever encountered.
The only contender who might possibly outstrip him was England's J.B. Morton, who, like O'Nolan, poured out his profuse comic talents in a regular newspaper column - in Morton's case, it was 'Beachcomber' in The Daily Express, a national treasure for fully fifty years. It is sometimes said of great actors that they could make even the reading of the phone book compelling. It was perhaps the epitome of Morton's genius that he achieved this in print: one of the irregular series which formed running jokes in his column was 'The Register of Huntingdonshire Cabmen', which was nothing more than short lists of names, and most of them not at all unusual or outlandish.... and yet the context, the setup was so perfect that it was side-splittingly funny.
To my knowledge, Morton wrote only this column, never any books or plays or even short stories. However, when I was about 10 or 12 I bought an anthology of great English humorous stories which included my first exposure to 'Beachcomber' - a story created by collating several short pieces from the column on a related theme: government preparations for the 1936 Coronation, and in particular, the headaches that this was causing for the FCO's roving troubleshooter in Africa, "Big White Carstairs". I laughed so hard, I cried. That's the first time I can ever remember that happening, and it hasn't reoccurred often since. Probably one of the great turning points in my life....
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“To my knowledge, Morton wrote only this column, never any books or plays or even short stories.”
Morton considered his Beachcomber work more or less a hobby that paid the bills. According to the editor of a Beachcomber collection (Cram Me with Eels!) given to me a few years ago, Morton dashed off his humorous pieces (what he called his “stuff”) in a few hours, freeing up his time for the more serious historical and literary pursuits that he loved. The ardor of his Francophilia can be measured by the number of serious works he wrote on topics and figures from French history. These include studies of the French Revolution (The Bastille Falls, Camille Desmoulins, Saint-Just, Brumaire) and other topics of French history (The Dauphin), plus several biographies—Marshal Ney, Ste. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Polish king Jan Sobieski, and his good friend Hilaire Belloc (not a Frenchman, but a fellow Anglo-Catholic). These books are no longer in print but can be obtained (most of them, at least) from Internet sources.
Again according to the editor of Cram Me with Eels!, Morton also wrote two travel books (Sideways through Borneo and Pyrenean); seven novels (The Barber of Putney; Skylighters; Drink Up, Gentlemen; The Cow Jumped over the Moon; Hag’s Harvest; The Gascon; Maladetta); five books of verse (Gorgeous Poetry; Tally-Ho!; Who’s Who in the Zoo; 1933, and Still Going Wrong; The Dancing Cabman); four collections of essays (Enchanter’s Nightshade, Penny Royal, Old Man’s Beard, Vagabond); and, for good measure, a collection of short stories (Springtime), a current-events/political book (The New Ireland), and a fairy tale (The Death of the Dragon).
“I laughed so hard, I cried.” So do I when I read Beachcomber! J.B. Morton was as versatile and erudite as he was surrealistically funny. Most of his literary output is out of print, but even today his work is always rewarding when you can find it.
Thank you for that information. I've read three different Beachcomber anthologies, I think, (the most recent one had an introduction by Michael Frayn) but I don't recall any of them mentioning any of this other writing. The Wikipedia article on him (which perhaps you might expand) currently says only: "Morton also wrote a few pieces on French history, in the style of his good friend Hilaire Belloc, but these were not widely read and are now forgotten."
Another of my favourite humorous writers, H.H. Munro ('Saki'), wrote a bulky 'History of Russia', but that also seems to be lost now. I couldn't even find a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
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