There Was A Young Man of ...
THE LURE OF THE LIMERICK by William S. Baring-Gould. 246 pages. Potter. $5.
"Scorn not the sonnet," wrote William Wordsworth, who had composed hundreds of those 14-line verses, some memorable, but most of them, notably his 47 sonnets on the ecclesiastical history of England, long forgotten.
Many people despise the limerick, an equally strict art form, but it survives because it is easily remembered. Until recently, limericks were mostly unprintable and constituted one of the few forms of modern oral literature.
The late William S. Baring-Gould, a descendant of the author of Onward Christian Soldiers and an authority on nursery rhymes, took advantage of the new permissiveness to print a collection of the best five-line shockers in the lan guage. It is one of the brightest such collections since Norman Douglas' clandestine compilation of a generation ago. Most of Baring-Gould's specimens are still unprintable by magazine conventions, since
The limerick's an art form complex
Whose contents run chiefly to sex; It's famous for virgins And masculine urgin's
And vulgar erotic effects.
These effects notwithstanding, the limerick is very far from being pornography. Indeed, it serves something largely contrary to the purposes of today's pornographers--it produces laughter. Poet Wystan Auden is quoted to this end in the current collection:
The Marquis de Sade and Genet
Are most highly thought of today; But torture and treachery Are not my sort of lechery,
So I've given my copies away.
The Eunuch from Munich. It is perhaps because of their humorous content that limericks have never been a popular art form with women, who, as a class, do not enjoy a joke about sex unless they are perfectly sure that it is not a joke against sex. They cannot take with tea and sympathy the sexual troubles of the bobby from Nottingham Junction, or fertile Myrtle, or the eunuch from Munich, or the young man of St. John's. Or the fellow named Brett, who
Loved a girl in his shiny Corvette; We know it's absurd But the last that we heard
They hadn't untangled them yet.
The literature of the limerick is of course filled with sagas of girls who went too far:
There was a young lady named Gloria
Who'd been had by Sir Gerald Du Maurier,
And then by six men,
Sir Gerald again,
And the band at the Waldorf-Astoria.
It should not be thought that the limerick is lowbrow poetry muttered by beery men glad to get away from their wives and into the saloon. A strict art form, the limerick is the special province of the literate, oldfashioned, word-oriented man. Only those who respect and understand the magic of words can enjoy the holiday from sense in the limerick, where the rhyme as often as not dictates the sense.
One to Remember. More than 50 years ago, writes Baring-Gould, the Princeton Tiger published a publishable limerick that went:
There was an old man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket; But his daughter, named Nan, Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket. This innocent rhyme was instantly followed by innumerable sub-wits who varied the towns (Pawtucket, Manhasset), or thought that they could find a better last line. It is probably one or another coarse version of this that most lim erick fanciers remember.
Baring-Gould, who was a promotion writer at Time Inc. until his death last month, did his scholarly best to establish the limerick in early English tradition, with versions that reach back to the first modern lyric--"Sumer is icumen in"--but the classic limerick goes back no further than the work of Non sense Master Edward Lear, who, with British understatement, always wrote a clean, rug-pulling last line. Lear might have improved the popular appeal of his work if he had been able to follow the advice of Don Marquis on the proper quality of the limerick:
It needn't have ribaldry's taint Or strive to make everyone faint.
There's a type that's demure And perfectly pure Though it helps quite a lot if it ain't.
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